The 'Two Brothers' mummies, discovered by the modern world in 1907, reside in the Manchester Museum  and are the mummies of, unsurprisingly, two elite men (they didn't mummify peasants), Khnum-nakht and Nakht-ank.

The remains date to around 1800 B.C. but there has always been argument about whether or not the two are actually related even though they share a joint burial site at Deir Rifeh, a village 250 miles south of Cairo. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the coffins indicated that both men were the sons of an unnamed local governor and had mothers with the same name, Khnum-aa. It was then the tomb and the men became known as the Two Brothers.

The Chinese government’s ongoing attempts to create a social credit system aimed at rating the trustworthiness of people and companies have generated equal measures of fascination and anxiety around the world. Social credit is depicted as something uniquely Chinese – a nefarious and perverse digital innovation that could only be conceived of and carried out by a regime like the Chinese Communist Party.

It's been well-established by now but owing to a discredited International Agency for Research on Cancer claim, which environmental groups insist remains valid despite finding that a member of the Working Group had financial conflicts of interest (consulting for environmental groups) and signed an agreement with a litigation attorney before the claims were made public, concern has persisted.

A new Pew Research Center survey examining people’s experiences in the workplace and perceptions of fair treatment for women provides just the results you would guess; half of women say they have been subjected to gender discrimination.

The survey was 4,914 U.S. adults was conducted from July 11 to Aug. 10, 2017 and included 2,344 workers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) jobs.

North Korea is going to send a team to the Winter Olympics in South Korea. The news is looking promising with a significant thawing of relations between the two Koreas in advance of the Winter Olympics. High level talks have begun already between North and South Korea. with the main focus on preprations for the Olympics. The US is behind it too. President Donald Trump said “If something good can happen and come out of those talks it would be a great thing for all of humanity. That would be a great thing for the world. Very important.”

In the United States, we just had another Supermoon, and at the end of this month we will have a Blue Moon (the second full moon in a month) with a lunar eclipse, which is pretty special. Though doomsday prophets like to make a lot out of those natural phenomena, the rest of us want to plan our vacations around them - the solar eclipse in the summer of 2017 caused the largest mass migration in America's history because everyone wanted the best view.

I was born and have lived in Venice for over 51 years now (omitting to mention some 2 years of interruption when I worked for Harvard University, 18 years ago), but this has come to an end on December 31st, when I concluded a rather complex move to Padova, 35 kilometers west. 
Venice is a wonderful city and quite a special place, if you ask me. A city with a millenary history, crammed with magnificent palaces and churches. A place where one could write a book about every stone. Walking through the maze of narrow streets or making one's way through a tight network of canals is an unforgettable experience, but living there for decades is something else - it makes you a part of it. I feel I own the place, in some way. So why did I leave it?

With tax cuts in 2018, the federal government is going to either increase the deficit or cut spending. And conservatives argue spending should be cut.

Will that impact science? It certainly will, but science was also not helped by the Obama administration, which focused on solar panels and healthcare but not science. After the heady days of the George W. Bush era, when NIH funding practically doubled, academics likely felt that increased on top of that could be realized, but it was not the case.