Worldvignettes — Another big lump of gold

He estimated that the weight of the pure gold contained in the lump would reach at least 4.5 kg, as the second largest piece of natural gold ever found in the province.

A 7.70 kg lump of natural gold, the biggest of its kind, was discovered by three farmers in Qaidam basin in the western part of Qinghai province in 1986. He said the new lump was in the shape of a `mother monkey’ squatting with a `baby monkey’ in its arms. Most of the gold lump was covered by rock and only the `mother monkey’s’ head and limbs and the entire `baby monkey’ were shining.

Dying star

LONDON: In recent months, astronomers have been observing the last surge of a dying star in the Sagittarius constellation, where a massive, almost burnt-out star has, as it were, scraped together its last stocks of energy and made itself a new outfit for a few more years or decades. This makes it appear gigantic, with a diameter over 80 times that of the sun.

The extraordinary object was discovered in February 1996 by a Japanese amateur astronomer, Yukio Sakurai. Not long afterwards, a group of German and Italian astronomers was able to take a spectrum of the star using the European southern observatory’s 3.6-metre telescope on La Silla, Chile. By analysing the star’s light, the scientists concluded that it was a shrinking star which had cast off its external atmosphere thousands of years ago, and had now flared up one last time like a dying log fire.

Pak mountaineers

Islamabad: A joint Sino-Pakistan mountaineering expedition has conquered the 8,125-metre high Nanga Parbat peak in the north of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Six Tibetan Chinese and two Pakistani members of the expedition on Sunday reached the summit of the Karakoram range peak, known as `killer mountain’ for the many deaths of climbers on its slopes.

The expedition was jointly organised by the China-Tibet Mountaineering Association and the Alpine Club of Pakistan to commemorate the golden jubilee celebrations of Pakistan’s independence and consisted of 11 Chinese and six Pakistanis.

Bad weather last week forced another Pakistani-Chinese expedition, organised to mark the same occasion, to give up its attempt to scale the 8,847-metre high Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak.

Ancient pottery

BERLIN: Scientists from the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin and their Moroccan colleagues have discovered the oldest known north African pottery.

The Rif mountain range in north-east Morocco was evidently inhabited as early as the beginning of the seventh millennium BC, said the institute’s president, Helmut Kyrieleis.

Apart from pottery shards, the archaeologists found the carved thoracic vertebra of a cow or buffalo fitted with a scratching stone. Dating back to the neolithic era, it is the only one of its kind found to date.