King Tut may be seen as the golden boy of ancient Egypt today, but during his reign, Tutankhamun wasn’t exactly a strapping sun god.

Instead, a new DNA study says, King Tut was a frail pharaoh, beset by malaria and a bone disorder—and possibly compromised by his newly discovered incestuous origins. (King Tut Pictures: DNA Study Reveals Health Secrets.)

The report is the first DNA study ever conducted with ancient Egyptian royal mummies. It apparently solves several mysteries surrounding King Tut, including how he died and who his parents were.

“He was not a very strong pharaoh. He was not riding the chariots,” said study team member Carsten Pusch, a geneticist at Germany’s University of Tübingen. “Picture instead a frail, weak boy who had a bit of a club foot and who needed a cane to walk.”

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This will count as a test grade. Students should be studying some everyday between now and then, there is study guide below that students can print and use to help them study. If students have questions they can come in before school to talk with me or send me an email oharae@fultonschools.org

Study Guide for 1st Semester Final Exam

Students will be allowed to use their study guide during the final exam.

I would love to be able to give Deven some new clothes (he wears a size 5T) and a new pair of shoes (size 11). There are also several items on Deven’s wishlist that it would be nice to get him as well. He would like a:

• bicycle
• some educational toys
• a handheld video game appropriate for a small child

If students would like to go shopping for some of these items and bring them in that would be great or students can bring in money to contribute to a gift from the class that would also be great.

Money needs to be turned in by Thursday Dec. 10th and other items need to be turned in by Dec. 11th.

Here is the presentation we used to study compounds and bonding: Compounds and Bonding

In your book you should study Ch 13 Sec 1 and Ch 4 Sec 2 and 3. If you have left your book at school you can access the online book from the homework page.

It is calving season in the Arctic. A flotilla of icebergs, some as jagged as fairytale castles and others as smooth as dinosaur eggs, calve from the ice sheet that smothers Greenland and sail down the fjords. The journey of these sculptures of ice from glaciers to ocean is eerily beautiful and utterly terrifying.

The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 1,500 miles (2,400km) from north to south and smothers 80% of this country. It has been frozen for 3m years. Now it is melting, far faster than the climate models predicted and far more decisively than any political action to combat our changing climate. If the Greenland ice sheet disappearedsea levels around the world would rise by seven metres, as 10% of the world’s fresh water is currently frozen here.

This is also the season for science in Greenland. Glaciologists, seismologists and climatologists from around the world are landing on the ice sheet in helicopters, taking ice-breakers up its inaccessible coastline and measuring glaciers in a race against time to discover why the ice in Greenland is vanishing so much faster than expected.

Other researchers have made live frogs and grasshoppers float in mid-air before, but such research with mice, being closer biologically to humans, could help in studies to counteract bone loss due to reduced gravity over long spans of time, as might be expected in deep space missions or on the surfaces of other planets.

Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments.

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Astronomers are celebrating the release of remarkable new images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

They prove the mission carried out by astronauts in May to service the observatory was an outstanding success.

The latest pictures include trademark Hubble visions – from colliding galaxies to dying stars.

Nasa says the orbiting telescope, regarded as one of the most important scientific tools ever built, should keep working until at least 2014.

The Atlantis shuttle mission in May was the fifth and final Hubble makeover.

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Professor Anthony Russell of the University of Calgary in Canada says the new finding could shed light on the functions of the spinal cord and the effects of spinal cord injury.

According to the study, in the journal Biology Letters, the detached member continues to leap, lurch and lunge, sometimes in intricate patterns never before detected, for up to 30 minutes.

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THE journey seemed simple enough, on the map anyway. Allison Fine left her home to drive to Vermont, just a few hours north on a major highway. She had studied the route and had a GPS gadget to help her. Nevertheless, she soon had absolutely no idea where she was.

“I don’t know what happened,” she says, “but I pulled over in tears, called my husband and said, ‘find me on Google Maps and talk me to Vermont’.” This he did, staying on the line for more than an hour.

Fine is an extreme case, but the feeling of getting hopelessly lost is something that most of us can relate to. In fact, along with our flair for language and our unparalleled intelligence, less-than-stellar navigational skills are among the things that can be considered uniquely human. While the vast majority of animals have no trouble finding their way around, most people, when stripped of maps or signs, are notoriously bad at it. A handful are so terrible at orienting themselves, even in places they know well, that they rarely leave the house alone (see “Lost in space”). “I try to study maps,” says Fine. “But when I get out into the real world, it just looks completely different.”

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