If any of these efforts prove successful, missions across the solar system for robots and humans could be unlocked like never before, turning us into a true spacefaring species.

"If we continue on the current trajectory, everything we know about space travel is going to change within a decade," Stephane Lintner, CEO and co-founder of Helicity Space, told Live Science.

But is it too good to be true? Can the dream of nuclear fusion propulsion ever be fully realized, or will it remain a sketchbook fantasy? After decades of dreaming, we might be on the cusp of finding out.

Fusion power

Nuclear fusion is a process whereby two atoms combine, or fuse, to form a heavier one, releasing excess energy in the form of light and heat. The best-known type of fusion is the process that occurs inside the sun at up to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius), where atoms of hydrogen fuse to form helium.

If this process could be replicated on Earth, it would provide us with huge amounts of energy. "The holy grail is free energy for everyone," Lintner said. Entire cities and countries would be transformed, bringing about a new age of clean and abundant power.

Many experiments and tests have been performed, and large fusion experiments, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, are under construction. However, commercially viable fusion reactors have yet to be built. One of the main problems is keeping the turbulent, superhot plasma required for fusion confined and at the right temperature. The record is currently 22 minutes.

If you take the same concept and put it in space, you suddenly have a means to power a spacecraft. What's more, the same problems with sustaining the plasma don't arise. Instead, the plasma can be fired out of the spacecraft, providing a steady thrust that can be used to accelerate a spacecraft to enormous speeds in the frictionless vacuum of space.

"Fusion propulsion in some ways is harder, and in some ways is easier, than terrestrial energy production," Bhuvana Srinivasan, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, told Live Science.

A fusion-powered spacecraft could be accelerated to hundreds ‪—‬ or even thousands ‪—‬ of miles per second through this method, multiple times faster than any spacecraft in history. In the most optimistic scenario, such a spacecraft could reach significant fractions of light speed, making interstellar travel a possibility.

There are tremendous challenges, of course. A space-based fusion reactor must be small enough to fit inside a spacecraft on a rocket. That's no easy feat, considering fusion reactors like ITER are the size of houses. You also need a way to create the immense heat required for fusion to occur, a source of fuel and propellant, and powerful magnets to keep the plasma from burning through the engine's walls.

Producing meaningful thrust requires staggering numbers of fusion reactions every second. A quintillion reactions would provide about 10 newtons of thrust ‪—‬ equivalent to the weight of a 1-liter bottle of water in your hand. But a fusion-powered engine would provide this thrust for months, rather than minutes for typical chemical propulsion, allowing large speeds to be reached eventually.

At first glance, this might sound nearly impossible, but some recent tests have shown it could be plausible

First plasma

In March, Pulsar Fusion demonstrated "first plasma" inside a nuclear fusion engine for the first time. In the test, which took place at the company's facility in Bletchley, one of Pulsar's Sunbird engines briefly transformed krypton gas into a plasma, demonstrating how the company might confine plasma within its exhaust system.

The demonstration showed "the plasma will sit in the system where you want it to sit," confined by an electromagnetic field, Richard Dinan, the company's CEO and founder, told Live Science. "The difficult work now is to be able to heat the plasma to temperatures nearer to fusion."

Dinan founded Pulsar Fusion in 2011 with the goal of building a fusion-powered propulsion system. The company's plan is to fuse helium-3 and deuterium, a lighter form of helium and a heavier form of hydrogen, and use the energy produced to heat helium-4 and expel it as propellant to produce thrust. The amount of thrust that can be produced depends on "how good you are at diverting those particles out the back of the spacecraft," Dinan said. "And right now, nobody knows how efficient we can be."

Just a few hundred grams of deuterium and helium-3 fuel would be needed to sustain the fusion process on a trip to Mars, Dinan said, but he claims their rocket would need 10 to 20 metric tons (11 to 22 U.S. tons) of deuterium propellant to provide the thrust to reach the speeds they're hoping for.

If they can make it work, their plans are ambitious. The company imagines fleets of its Sunbird vehicles traversing the solar system, taking people and cargo to and from destinations at speeds of up to 329,000 mph (529,000 km/h) ‪—‬ about 10 times faster than the Voyager 1 spacecraft currently traveling outside the solar system.

At those speeds ‪—‬ which aren't reached instantly, as the spacecraft need months to accelerate and decelerate ‪—‬ travel time to Mars could be halved from the nine months it takes with conventional chemical propulsion. Weight could be freed up for equipment because fusion is more efficient and needs less fuel. Quicker missions to farther destinations, such as to Saturn's moon Titan or the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, would also be in reach.

"I think we will see fusion as a propulsion system pretty soon," Dinan said. "The demand is certainly there."

A billion degrees

Pulsar Fusion's method of propulsion is known as dual direct fusion, where the plasma from the process is directly used to provide thrust. Samuel Cohen, a physics professor at Princeton University, is working on a similar concept, the Direct Fusion Drive, as part of a project called Starfire.

Cohen and his team have been investigating this concept for more than 20 years. Their idea is to fuse deuterium and helium-3, which is rare on Earth but abundant on the moon. His team has built a prototype fusion thruster at Princeton with plasma that reaches 18 million F (10 million C).

"It's a start, but you've got to get to a billion degrees" Celsius for deuterium and helium-3 fusion to occur, Cohen told Live Science. There are a few promising approaches to reaching those temperatures, including squishing the plasma or heating it up with radio or neutron beams.

Using their current plasma, Cohen claims the team has demonstrated a small amount of thrust ‪—‬ a few milligrams, or a few hundred-thousandths of a newton. Now, they hope to get more funding to take their concept further. "We need a few million dollars to start things off," Cohen said.

With enough support, Cohen said, they could have a working fusion propulsion system in 10 to 20 years. Meanwhile, Pulsar Fusion, which has received support from the European Space Agency and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, hopes to perform a demonstration of its thrusters in orbit by 2027.

Helicity Space is targeting a launch of its fusion propulsion system in the 2030s. The company, which raised $5 million in 2023, is developing the Helicity Drive, which relies on pulses of plasma, rather than continuous fusion, to provide thrust.

"If you get a reaction every few seconds, that's an amazing science experiment on Earth, but you can't do anything with it," Lintner said. "In space, you have the most advanced electric propulsion drive ever built. You change the game for propulsion."

Lintner said the company is aiming "for fusion temperatures very, very soon," and is then "planning on flying a first prototype within three years." By the 2030s, Lintner hopes to reach net gain in its fusion engines ‪—‬ producing more energy than is put in ‪—‬ to have a true fusion drive ready for use in space.

Going interstellar

But not everyone is convinced that fusion drives will propel us through the solar system. John Slough, who is working on his own fusion rocket design called the Fusion Driven Rocket (FDR), said he is wary of "false promises" in the field. He noted that much of the underlying physics around fusion propulsion remains extremely difficult.

"It still relies on scientific discovery for us to push it," Srinivasan said. "We need to figure out, how do we keep this fuel stable? Have we sorted a lot of the engineering and scientific challenges? It's not going to happen next year."

Remaining challenges include not only keeping the plasma stable, but also developing walls that can sufficiently contain the plasma, and shrinking the fusion system to fit inside a spacecraft, she added.

Other forms of nuclear propulsion might be more promising. NASA is developing SR-1 Freedom, a spacecraft powered by nuclear fission, not fusion. The goal for the spacecraft, announced in March, is to launch to Mars by December 2028, where three small robotic helicopters would be sent to explore the surface. The fission reactor would split uranium-235 to generate thrust.

"SR-1 Freedom will pave the way for space nuclear hardware," Steven Sinacore, the Space Reactor-1 Freedom Program Director at NASA, told Live Science in response to questions via email. "To sustain a presence on the Moon, send crews to Mars, and explore the outer solar system, the nation needs power that works everywhere, independent of the sun, and fission is that power."

However, fission-based propulsion, while extremely useful, cannot match the speeds promised by fusion propulsion. That's because fusion systems magnetically confine the plasma, meaning much higher temperatures can be reached. Fission temperatures, by contrast, are limited by the materials of the reactor where the fission reactions take place.

If any of the proposed fusion concepts were to become a reality, however, the possibilities would be enormous. Last year, Elena Ancona, a flight dynamics engineer at the Polytechnic University of Bari in Italy, and her colleagues described how a direct fusion drive could enable a mission to Sedna, a remote icy dwarf planet far beyond Neptune. For that mission, time is of the essence.

The dwarf planet will reach its closest point to the sun in 2075, and it will not be that close again for another 11,000 years. "If we want to make this mission, it's either now or in 11,000 years," Ancona said. With a traditional chemical spacecraft, a mission would need to be launched 30 years in advance. But with fusion propulsion, it could get to Sedna in just 10 years.

Many more destinations would be within reach if fusion propulsion were to become a reality. Perhaps even interstellar travel would be possible much further down the line. "People have known that fusion is the answer to deep-space travel since the 1960s," Lintner said. "It's only in the last decade that, commercially, people started to spend a lot of time on cracking the fusion code."

But there's a long way to go. "It's not for the faint of heart," Lintner said. But if fusion propulsion is ever going to happen, the next few years look as good a bet as any.

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'> 'Everything we know about space travel is going to change within a decade': The fusion breakthrough that could unlock a path to the stars

We've rounded up the best options for each usage case, based on our reviews and experience, to bring you the top models on the market.

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Best binoculars: FAQs

What binocular magnification do I need?

It depends what you're observing. Small, compact binoculars tend to have 7x or 8x magnification to keep the size down, with 8x also being the sweet spot for birdwatching, giving you enough power to identify birds without introducing any wobble. 10x is great for general purpose viewing, and for stargazing, you can use anywhere from 8x all the way up to 25x, depending on how close you want to see the sky (objective lens diameter matters more for stargazing).

What size objective lenses do I need?

Simply put, the larger your objective lens, the more light the binocular will let in. If you want to observe in low-light conditions, pick a pair with at least 42mm. For dedicated stargazing, we'd recommend at least 50mm. 25mm and 32mm are ideal for casual daytime viewing, and the smaller lenses mean more lightweight and compact binoculars, too.

Can I use binoculars if I wear glasses?

Yes, provided the binoculars have enough eye relief. Eye relief is the distance (in milimeters) from your eye to the ocular lens without seeing any tunnel vision, vignetting or shadows. A long eye relief (above 15mm-ish) is perfect if you wear glasses, but it's worth noting that some smaller models have a fairly short eye relief, so it's worth checking before you buy if you can't take your glasses off.

What is ED glass?

ED stands for "Extra-Low Dispersion". When light passes through standard, non-ED glass, it bends and splits into individual colors, and typically shows up as purple or green fringing around contrasted edges, like birds against the sky, treetops or the moon. This is known as color fringing or chromatic aberration. ED glass prevents this by forcing the different wavelengths of light to bend and align at the exact same focal point. Think of it like using AutoTune on a tone-deaf choir.

This color fringing typically shows up a lot when you're birdwatching, so it's important to buy a pair with ED glass if that's your main focus.

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'> Best binoculars 2026: The ultimate buying guide for birdwatching, stargazing and more Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive into the World of Fishes and Fishing" (Granta Books, 2025). George had previously written an award-winning book on the shipping industry, "Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything," (Granta Books, 2013) and had become more aware of the significant issues facing the fishing industry.

For the book, she traveled across continents, joining trawlers, fishers and aquaculturists (fish farmers) to learn more about the problems they face, while delving into fish intelligence and welfare with scientists. Finally, George also reveals some of the atrocities that take place at sea, including slavery and murder, as she tells Live Science in this interview about the book. "You can't police the sea; it's too big," she said.

"Every Last Fish" has been short-listed for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Hannah Osborne: You're a vegetarian who gets bad motion sickness. What made you want to write a book about the fishing industry?

Rose George: When I wrote my shipping book, I had a lot of skepticism about how the shipping industry works. But whenever I spoke to shipping people, they would say, "Well, if you think we're bad, you should look at fishing." And they were right. Fishing is way more complicated, and baffling, and a difficult industry in many ways.

One of the other big triggers was that when I was doing my initial research, two things struck me. One was that for the first time in history, we're going to be eating more farmed fish than hunted fish. We have switched from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers, even though in this case, it's fish. There are all the horrible statistics about how many fish stocks are overfished and depleted and under pressure. People kind of know that, and I think they kind of switch off from it — it's quite hard to enthuse them about the fact that the ocean is in such a terrible state.

One of the things that really fascinated me was the research into fish abilities and fish sentience. I definitely wanted this book to be not just about fishing but about fishes, the creatures, the animals. Because I don't think we think of them as animals. Most people think of animals as kind of furry, cute things that they can empathize with or sympathize with, whereas sympathizing with fish, I mean, Samuel Coleridge called them "slimy things in the water." And, you know, they're not slimy, but I still think that's an overwhelming attitude [among the public].

In the last 20 years or so, [scientists have] looked at what their abilities actually are. They live in a very complex environment. They have to have complex abilities. I absolutely loved the research. In one study, scientists had goldfish steering around in an aquarium. It was nuts but fascinating.

I wanted to look at the industry and look at the animals. I wanted to make it more than a dead thing on the plate. And I hope I did that.

HO: You traveled to so many places for this book. Were there common themes among fishers from across the world? And if so, what were they, in terms of their problems, their work ethic, the things that they have to deal with?

RG: I didn't go fishing in Norway, but I did go to salmon farms, which is quite different. But I would say that there is a sense that it's a unique profession. It's a dangerous profession because you are in a dangerous element and every single ship can sink, no matter what size.

People die, and people get injured. There's all the heavy machinery if it's a sizable fishing vessel with winches and chains and everything under tension. And, of course, accidents happen. The fishing industry has gotten a lot safer in some parts of the world, but it's still dangerous.

For example, let's compare the small-boat fishermen who I went fishing with in England and the Senegalese fishers. There's a lot of similarity in that there's a pride in what they do and the sense of being beleaguered. Definitely in Senegal, it's very pronounced in that a lot of their fish has just been stolen by European and other nations, and has ended up as fish meal in European countries. In Senegal, Sardinella — a variety of sardine — is a staple fish, and it's just not there anymore. What happens is, the more you fish, the more you tend to fish the smaller fish. So you'll fish down. You'll end up fishing juvenile fish. And then, of course, you've got no fish to grow up.

I think West Africa, in general, is a very sad case of how the fishing industry works because hardly any of it is illegal. In Senegal, the government sold all the licenses to the Chinese trawlers and Spanish trawlers and what have you. A lot of the problems are from legal fishing.

Rex was banned from fishing wild salmon, and his fishing season was curtailed. [Editor's note: Rex Harrison is a small-scale fisher in England whom George spent time with for the book.] They definitely feel they're drowning in paperwork. I think that it's made it a very defensive industry, particularly in the U.K. because it is such a tiny industry. The biscuit industry is bigger. Yet fishing has this massive kind of cultural place that is really quite a nostalgic thing. There is an industry, but it's nothing like it was and the number of fishermen is much smaller. Young men don't want to go into fishing; young women don't want to go into fishing.

There's this sense of feeling beleaguered, but there's still pride in the fact that they do this activity, which is unique. They are the last hunters, really.

HO: What did you think was the biggest disconnect between the regulations and the reality of being on a boat?

RG: The fishing industry is so complex. It could mean a 3-foot [1 meter] wooden boat with no engine or one of the massive trawlers. That's all the fishing industry. But routinely, across the board, what the fishing industry needs is more and better monitoring.

You can't monitor a vessel at sea. It has to be self-reported. So what goes on at sea? All we have are fishing observers doing an extremely risky job. I think it's only about 2% of the fishing fleet that has an observer on board. There are some fish stocks that have much better, higher rates of observers. For example, in the U.S., Alaska — the Pacific Coast — has a very good observer system. [Editor's note: Fishing observers are independent specialists who travel on commercial vessels to monitor compliance and regulations.]

But then you look at Eritara [Aati Kaierua], the fishing observer from Kiribati who was pretty obviously murdered. There are observers of a lot of those big tuna boats in the Pacific. But routinely, what happens when a fishing observer goes missing or is injured or dies is, you get these forensic reports that say they all died of hypertension ‪—‬ it's like it's an epidemic down there. But they're all we have — the fishing observers — because there's no remote electronic monitoring yet. That would be much better. I think what we need is more data. But then again, you need someone to process the data, and you need a way for the data to be accurately sent. Self-reporting has its limits as a robust monitoring tool.

It's why you might find that the fish you're eating is not what you think it is, because there are so many opportunities for swaps. One fisher may have reached his quota on a particular stock of fish. There are lots of opportunities, particularly when you get into illegal fishing. You get something called trans-shipment, which is two fishing vessels exchanging catches at sea.

HO: You just touched on the observers, and there are some awful stories in the book. What did you find most shocking while you were researching and writing the book?

RG: What shocked me the most was meeting the four Ghanaians who had taken jobs on a scalloper, thinking that the U.K. was reputable and everything was aboveboard. All their safety training had been done. Then, they got to work on this scalloper, and it was just a horror show. This was a scalloper that was working in the U.K. EEZ. [Editor's note: An EEZ, or exclusive economic zone, is the region between 14 and 230 miles (22.5 to 370 kilometers) from a country's coast that can be explored for its marine resources]. It was never on the high seas. It was always off the U.K., and yet these men were treated appallingly.

This is a particular company that was known to be rogue and has been somewhat prosecuted. What arose at that point was — and what the International Transport Workers' Federation highlighted around the time — that these cases were coming to light, and a lot of fishing vessels were using what was called trans-shipment visas.

What that essentially means is, if you're working on a ship and you call in at one country but you immediately get on your ship, you get a trans-shipment visa. Because [the crewmembers are] on these visas, they couldn't really come ashore; they were basically imprisoned on their boats. And that's in the U.K.

There are lots of perfectly good operators on the seas. But if you do want to be a criminal, there is no better place to do it. That is a problem. You can't police the sea; it's too big.

HO: On the flip side, you spent so much time with fishers. What was the most moving story for you?

RG: I really loved Rex's story of saving the birds. Rex looks like a Viking. He's such a nice guy, but he's quite eccentric. He had been fishing in Filey Bay [off the eastern coast of the U.K.] for 40 years and had just accepted that bycatch is a huge problem in fishing. When you catch one species, often you have to catch others. And often they end up just being chucked back into the water and they won't survive. It's just needless slaughter.

But another problem is seabird bycatch, because obviously the seabirds want the fish. Filey is right next to Bempton Cliffs, which is an RSPB [Royal Society for the Protection of Birds] reserve that's very famous for its puffins, but it's also got guillemots and kittiwakes and all sorts. Rex was just really sort of inured to this death toll of seabirds in his net. Then, this beautiful friendship arose between him and this guy from BirdLife International, Rory [Crawford].

Rory remembers turning up, and Rex and all his fellow fishers are kind of standing there with their arms folded, which is kind of typical. But they managed to become friends. And because Rex respected Rory, and Rory respected Rex, Rex changed his nets to a darker filament so that birds would see them more clearly, and changed the design of them so that they wouldn't get caught. It reduced bird bycatch in Filey Bay by 90%. It's just extraordinary.

I [also] really liked the fact that Captain Tom McClure [a trawler from the English county of Cornwall] and I managed to be friends, even though we disagree so profoundly about bottom trawling, and we always will. I think it's a terrible fishing method, but you don't have to be adverse. He still invites me out on his trawler, but given I was sick on it last time, I don't think I'm going to do that anytime soon. But the offer's there, which is nice.

HO: I really liked the story of Lillian Bilocca and everything that she did to try and improve the safety standards for fishers in the '70s and '80s. Do you think that safety has improved enough, or is there still a long way to go?

RG: It's definitely improved a lot. Lillian Bilocca was just a wonderful woman — a working class hero. She was a fishwife, worked in a fish processing factory, and it was a terrible time. In 1968, three full trawlers went down with only one survivor ‪—‬ about 50 or 60 men dead from one town.

It was a very close-knit town. Lillian became this astonishing campaigner. They ended up going to London to meet ministers, and this raft of measures was put through with astonishing speed just because of the publicity and the ministers were embarrassed.

But she had to face such enormous hostility. The trawler industry hated her. The trawler owners — their incentive was obviously to get as much fish as possible — so they would send out their boats to really unsafe Icelandic waters in the deepest winter. It was ludicrously unsafe, and at the time, the boats had no radio operator. There was no medical ship nearby. There was no help, and they just went down.

Since then, there have been loads of measures, but there are still serious issues.

HO: There's a lot of grim reading in the book about the state of the oceans, the industry, the things that happen at sea, and there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of change on the horizon. Did you see any signs of hope or signals that things could change that will make the fishing industry more sustainable and less destructive?

RG: Yes and no. I mean, if you learn anything about fishing, I don't think you're going to come away from it particularly optimistic. But then there are people who are absolute experts about fishing who do find some optimism, so we have to learn from that.

One of the biggest pieces of environmental legislation passed last year was the Global Ocean Treaty, which was amazing and astonishing and had all the NGOs doing press releases with exclamation marks. They were all absolutely delighted. The reason that is important is that most international legislation operates on consensus. So you have to wait for like 180 countries to agree, which is why the International Maritime Organization is so slow, because it operates on consensus. The Global Ocean Treaty does not, so states can nominate parts of the high seas that they want to be protected. It can be a lot more flexible, a lot more nimble, and it could protect the high seas.

The downside is that only 10% of fishing happens on the high seas. So although we need to protect as much of the ocean as possible, it may be that's not where the major problem lies, but it's a really good start.

The other thing that gave me hope is … that it is quite impressive how quickly the ocean can recover when given the chance. When there have been no-take zones established … they are astonishing because sea life recovers very quickly.

Also, it expands because obviously the fish move; the populations recover; they move; things grow. It's such a win-win situation just to protect small pockets of the ocean and see that protective effect expand. But to do that, we have to stop taking everything from the ocean and assuming it's got an infinite bounty, because it clearly doesn't.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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'> Author Rose George dives into the dark depths of the fishing industry

The burial, nicknamed the Tomb of the Stone Chamber, was excavated this summer, according to a translated statement from the Italian Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria (SABAP-VT-EM). But the discovery builds on work that French archaeologists carried out in the late 19th century.

In 1889, archaeologist Stéphane Gsell identified the circular enclosure of the Etruscan burial mound in the cemetery at Vulci. But while Gsell delineated what he thought was the perimeter of the grave, he never found the tomb itself because he ran out of time and money to dig further.

Now, archaeologists with the Return to Vulci project think they've finally found the burial chamber inside the "Gsell tumulus" — and it's much larger than they, and Gsell, expected.

"This is the burial. We are absolutely certain of it," Christian Mazet, an archaeologist at the British Museum and co-director of the project, told Etruscan Times. The discovery of weapons, parts of a chariot, gold objects and high-quality ceramics means "there is no doubt that this is a tomb of the very highest rank," he said.

The new excavation revealed the Tomb of the Stone Chamber, which dates to the seventh century B.C. Archaeologists uncovered the walls of the tomb's three burial chambers and found numerous artifacts preserved beneath the chambers' collapsed roofs, including jewelry, clothing and shoes.

In the side chambers of the tomb, archaeologists recovered much rarer items, according to the SABAP-VT-EM statement, such as a bronze tripod made on what is today the Greek island of Rhodes, just off Turkey's southwest coast. They also found a nearly complete banquet set, and some of the vessels were still in their original positions after spending centuries underground.

The Etruscan cemetery at Vulci is well known for its wealthy tombs, thousands of which were discovered in the 19th century. But although the Indigenous Etruscans ruled over central Italy for several centuries, their society began to decline in the fourth century B.C., owing to the rise of Roman civilization. Their language is only partly understood today, meaning most information about the Etruscans comes from archaeological sites such as Vulci.

The Tomb of the Stone Chamber was built in Vulci's heyday. Gsell had estimated the size of the tumulus at around 102 feet (31 meters) in diameter, calling it a "new Cuccumella," referring to the largest Etruscan burial mound previously discovered at Vulci. (The giant Cuccumella tumulus had a diameter of roughly 230 feet, or 70 m.) According to Etruscan Times, the Return to Vulci project experts' initial calculations suggest that the Tomb of the Stone Chamber may have been similar in size to Cuccumella, ‪or perhaps even larger.

"Everything tells us that it is one of the most monumental at Vulci," Mazet told Etruscan Times.

The tomb and burial mound have been covered to preserve them, according to the SABAP-VT-EM statement, but research will continue in 2027.

'> Archaeologists discover 'tomb of the very highest rank' in 2,700-year-old Etruscan cemetery