There were two stars in the news for me last week. One was, of course, the inspirational Barrack Obama lighting up Europe on his beautifully choreographed tour but the other glittering personality of the week was a scientist, the amazingly enthusiastic and joyful Dr Sarah Parcak from the University of Alabama who with her colleagues discovered 17 lost pyramids in Egypt, along with thousands of ancient tombs and other structures by using infrared satellite images. Now they may not look that exciting to you or me and you might think one pyramid is very much like another but none of this mattered when you saw Dr Parcak’s excited face explaining her discoveries to us on world news bulletins. Even if we didn’t care at first, Dr Parcak was just so full of joy in her own work that she made everyone love her and envy her too. If only everyone could get so much pleasure from their work.
Here she is talking about her work at the University of Alabama before the recent Egyptian discoveries: