A proposed underwater museum in Alexandria, Egypt, came closer to reality in September 2008, when the UN established a committee to aid the design process with the Egyptian government.

Fiberglass tunnels would connect aboveground galleries, near the New Library of Alexandria, to the underwater facility, where antiquities would be visible in their natural resting places at the site of Cleopatra's now sunken palace.



Cleopatra's palace sank long ago into the Mediterranean, but visitors to Alexandria, Egypt, may eventually view the complex's remnants via the world's first underwater museum.
A site for the museum has been proposed near the New Library of Alexandria, where the famed queen of Egypt is believed to have sheltered herself with her lover Marc Antony before taking her own life.
Shown with a 2008 illustration of the proposed underwater museum (upper center), the Bay of Alexandria once contained Cleopatra's island palace and the Pharos of Alexandria lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Both of them were done in centuries ago by earthquakes.

"It will not simply be a museum as such. It is part of a whole vision to revitalize the whole city and its heritage," said Naguib Amin, the site-management expert from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.



The proposed museum's underwater facility (at bottom in an artist's conception) will be difficult and expensive to build and is the focus of the just launched two-year feasibility study. But planners believe that the benefits of plunging visitors into the historical context of the objects--on the sunken island that once held Cleopatra's palace--will be worth the trouble.

"When you go to an archaeological site, you have an irreplaceable emotion. It's not like going to see a movie," said architect Jacques Rougerie. "It's like the astronaut who cannot share with other people what it is like to be in space."



Twin sphinxes flank a statue of a priest of Isis amid fallen columns on Alexandria's sunken island of Antirhodos in a photo from the late 1990s. The statue was raised in 1998 and became part of a traveling exhibition.

Similar tableaux remain on the sunken island, which was found by underwater archaeologists in 1996, and should be visible from the proposed underwater museum.



The marble head of Roman princess Antonia Minor, mother of Emperor Claudius, rests on sand at the now sunken site of Cleopatra's Alexandria, Egypt, palace in an undated photo. Behind the head is a toppled statue of a Ptolemaic, or Greco-Egyptian, king in the guise of Hermes-Thoth, messenger of the gods.

Visitors to the proposed underwater museum should be able to view these artifacts in situ.



An eroded sphinx, shown in an undated photo, isn't much more than a silhouette in the Bay of Alexandria's dusky waters. The murk is driving the proposed museum's planners to propose covering the monuments, then cleaning the enclosed water.

"Try to picture a glass tube," said Amin of the Egyptian antiquities agency in September 2008. "You simply put it over the main monuments that we need to highlight."



Rich with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a reproduction of two granite blocks--found a third of a mile (500 meters) apart in the Bay of Alexandria--helped prove that the pieces originally formed a single tablet.

"Sort of the whole ancient city of Alexandria is lying under the water, just meters away from the shore," said Amin of the Egyptian antiquities council in September 2008, when the UN established a committee to aid the museum-planning process.



Divers raise a 4-foot-tall (1.5-meter-tall), granite, first-century A.D. statue of a priest of Isis from Alexandria, Egypt's bay in 1998.

A UN convention advises that submerged artifacts should remain on the seabed as a way to respect their historical context--a view endorsed by the planners of the proposed underwater museum in Alexandria, Egypt. The proposed museum got a boost in September 2008, when the UN established a committee to aid the museum's planning.

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Prisoners taking part in a beauty contest pose before the start of the competition in the women's prison Centro de Orientacion Femenino (COF) in Fraijanes, some 40 km east of Guatemala City. The contest was held in the framework of the Inmates Day celebrations. The COF has a population of 135 inmates.





Inmate Karen Espana gets ready at the beginning of a beauty contest in the women's prison





Inmate Ingryd Paola poses for a picture of a beauty contest .









Inmates take the catwalk during a beauty contest.



Prisoner Karen Espana parades during a beauty contest in the women's prison Centro de Orientacion Femenino .



A prisoner is cheered by mates as she walks the catwalk during a beauty contest.



Scottish prisoner Wendy Moncriezz looks at the camera pior to the start of a beauty contest.



Inmate Karen Espana talks to a journalist after winning the beauty contest in the women's prison .



Prisoner Karen Espana celebrates after winning the beauty contest in the women's prison Centro de Orientacion Femenino (COF) in Fraijanes

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Haven ... Malaysia's Cherating Beach Resort is located between pristine beachfront and unspoilt jungle.



Guests scattered as the raiders grabbed their bounty and disappeared back to the rooftops as quickly as they had arrived.



While the long-tailed macaques sat on the roof enjoying the spoils of their heist, our 18-month-old "monkey'' giggled at the flurry of activity and shovelled more steamed rice into her mouth.

While these cheeky critters sometimes pop by unannounced for breakfast, they're also renowned for opening unlocked doors and windows and rifling through bags looking for food.

Monkeys are not the only entertainment at Club Med's luxurious Cherating Beach resort on Malaysia's east coast.



The resort has 324 rooms set on 80ha of sprawling, manicured lawns and gardens, set between pristine beachfront and unspoilt jungle. Monkeys amble across the rooftops and swing from the trees.



A holiday there can be as adventurous or relaxing as visitors choose.

Club Med was one of the pioneers of the all-inclusive holiday, so guests can eat, drink and try a huge variety of activities without paying extra. Stroll along the beach, swim in the South China Sea or paddle around the resort's huge pool facilities, which include a spa and wading area for children.

The resort has daily water exercise sessions and a well-equipped fitness centre, or guests can try their hands at sailing, kayaking, wall-climbing, roller-blading or bungy-bouncing.

Also available are tennis, table tennis, driving range and putting green, soccer balls, bocce, archery, trapeze lessons and yoga under palm trees as the waves roll in.

Our favourite activity, however, was lying by the pool with cold drinks and trashy novels.



Fun for the kids : The room included a cot, baby bath, change mat, bottle warmers, baby shampoo and food, while the main restaurant had high chairs, booster seats, jars of baby food and plastic plates, bowls and cutlery.


Meal times are no different. Make sure you pack your appetite, as you won't be bored when it comes to food. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners are an extravagant, sumptuous and endless buffet.

The volume and variety of dishes on offer was staggering, ranging from Italian, Chinese, Malaysian and Korean to Japanese and Indian. Equally tempting was the idea of leaving our room to enjoy the fresh fruit, desserts and pastries.

Each week, chefs prepare about 320 different dishes (and up to 2300 meals a day), many cooked on the spot.

There are a number of day and half-day tours that are not included in the package.



If you've ever tried to budget for a holiday with children, only to see the bills balloon with extras, you'll love knowing what you'll get – and for how much – with Club Med.

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Your eyes are amongst the most expressive areas on your body, and your eyes are wholly unique. Naturally, a great way to emphasize your eyes is with body piercings! While facial piercings on the whole are becoming ever more popular and acceptable, piercings in the eye area are really pioneering new styles and methods in the body piercing and body modification world.

While I do not want to discourage you from getting a piercing in the eye area (in fact, I think eye area piercings are a beautiful way to enhance features).

Eyebrow Piercings are common piercings in our culture. The eyebrow piercing can be placed anywhere on the eyebrow, although only a very skilled piercer should consider piercing near the inner corners (closest to the nose) of the eyebrow, for three major nerves are located in this area (for this reason, this isn't a popular placement).

Most piercings are pierced at a forty degree angle, so as to minimize risks of tearing the jewelry out. Most initial jewelry consists of either curved barbells or captive rings, depending on your facial structure. Some people get multiple eyebrow piercings on one or both eyebrows - your creativity is really the limit.

Once pierced, these piercings take anywhere from five to eight weeks to heal, but irritations such as makeup or sweat can irritate the piercing and prolong healing. While the eyebrow is one of the least infected piercings, the risk is indeed there - so be sure to soak using warm saline solution, don't touch the jewelry with dirty hands, and follow all aftercare instructions given to you by your professional piercer.

Heating a sharp metal object over a flame does NOT constitute as disinfecting! Many bacteria are only destroyed at temperatures far higher than what a flame can provide! Tempting though it may be - don't pierce your own eyebrow; it will probably become infected, it may become rejected, and if your placement is wrong it will look awkward. Spending a couple bucks for a licensed professional to do it is well worth your money.

Speaking of professional piercers, some people may try and tell you that you can pierce your own eyebrow with a safety pin (or something of that sort) with no difficulty.

A very unique and uncommon piercing is the Third Eye Piercings. Very similar to a bridge piercing (see my nose piercing article for more information), the Third Eye Piercings are pierced using surface bars or curved barbells. 

These piercings are located between your eyebrows (maybe even a bit higher that between the eyebrows, depending on face shape) and are technically considered a surface piercing.

Most of these piercings do not last long because there are just too many irritants in our world to prevent a complete and infection-free healing.

A 650-million-year-old underwater reef, 10 times higher than the Great Barrier Reef, has been discovered in the middle of Australia's outback.

The ancient reef, formed nearly 100 million years before the first known animal life evolved, is the only one of its age in the world. Scientists believe it may hold evidence of the earliest examples of primitive animal life.

The reef was discovered by three Melbourne scientists in the Northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Formed hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs roamed the earth, it existed for five to 10 million years in a tropical period sandwiched between two ice ages.

The scientists, from the School of Earth Science at Melbourne University believe the reef could also explain the extent of climate change in earth's early history. 

"Some of the complex organisms we have seen in the reef have never been discovered previously," associate Professor Malcolm Wallace, told The Times Online. "There is nothing like these fossils in any modern setting but they have structures that are similar to some animals." 

The oldest known animal fossils are 570 million years old. The Flinders Ranges reef is 80 million years older than that and was, he said: "The right age to capture the precursors to animals."

"With the movement over millions of years on Australia's tectonic plates, the reef has been turned 90 degrees skywards from its once horizontal position," said Professor Wallace's colleague Jonathan Giddings. "This has exposed the whole depth of the reef. These tectonic forces have resulted in very ancient history being pushed up to the present. 

"Today's advances in satellite imagery are helping us to see the reef very easily," he said. "Geologists had seen this mass before but had not really recognised it as being once a reef."

"This reef is much too old to be made of coral, " said Professor Wallace. "It was constructed by microbial organisms and other complex, chambered structures that have not been discovered before." 

The escarpment of the reef would have been 1100 metres at its highest point, ten times higher than the 100 metre high escarpment of the Great Barrier. The section of the reef that has been preserved is 20 km wide, but there is evidence that it extended across around 100 kilometress, comparable to the Great Barrier which stretches for 2,600 kilometres.

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A £1m clock called the "time eater" has been unveiled at Cambridge University by Professor Stephen Hawking.

The author of A Brief History of Time was guest of honour when the unique clock, which has no hands or numbers, was revealed at Corpus Christi College. 

Dubbed the strangest clock in the world, it features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut into its face which light up to show the time.
Its creator John Taylor said he "wanted to make timekeeping interesting". 

The Corpus Clock will stand outside the college's library and will be on view to the public.

Tribute : Dr Taylor is an inventor and horologist - one who studies the measurement of time - and was a student at Corpus Christi in the 1950s. He has given the clock as a gift to his former college. 
The grasshopper or "chronophage", meaning "time eater", advances around the 4ft-wide face, each step marking a second. Its movement triggers blue flashing lights which travel across the face eventually stopping at the correct hour and minute. But the clock is only accurate once every five minutes - the rest of the time the lights are simply for decoration.


Harrison also invented the grasshopper escapement - a tiny internal device that releases a clock's gears at each swing of its pendulum. 

Dr Taylor told the Daily Mail newspaper he decided "to turn the clock inside out... so you can see the seconds being eaten up".

The clock has taken five years and a million pounds to construct. The Corpus Clock is wound up by an electric motor which will last for the next 25 years. It took a team of eight engineers and craftsman five years to mould the 24-carat gold-plated face. 

Alan Midleton, curator of the British Horological Institute, said: "It's a wonderful idea. 

"Only time will tell whether it will become as famous as Big Ben - I doubt it, actually." 

Dr Taylor made his fortune developing the kettle thermostat.

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