News Link--New detection method discovered lung infection in Incan mummy

Just a drive-by post. According to Science Daily:

Detecting diseases in ancient remains is often fraught with difficulty, especially because of contamination. Techniques based on microbe DNA can easily be confused by environmental contamination, and they can only confirm that the pathogen was present, not that the person was infected, but the researchers behind the study, led by Angelique Corthals of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, found a way around this problem. They used proteomics, focusing on protein rather than DNA remains, to profile immune system response from degraded samples taken from 500 year-old mummies.

The team swabbed the lips of two Andean Inca mummies, buried at 22,000-feet elevation and originally discovered in 1999, and compared the proteins they found to large databases of the human genome. They found that the protein profile from the mummy of a 15-year old girl, called "The Maiden," was similar to that of chronic respiratory infection patients, and the analysis of the DNA showed the presence of probably pathogenic bacteria in the genus Mycobacterium, responsible for upper respiratory tract infections and tuberculosis. In addition, X-rays of the lungs of the Maiden showed signs of lung infection at the time of death. Proteomics, DNA, and x-rays from another mummy found together with the Maiden did not show signs of respiratory infection.

The full report can be read here.

Mummy Myth—Hair and Nails Grow After Death

In episode 16 of the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise, “ShuttlepodOne,” the characters Trip and Reed are stuck on a damaged shuttle craft with no ships, space stations, or friendly, habitable planets near enough to help them.  They are expecting to die.  It’s an elevator episode where these two characters, who are different from each other in an Odd Couple sort of way, get to bond.  I like the episode, but one part has always stood out for me and not in a good way.  In one scene, Reed starts shaving his beard and he explains that it’s because basically he wants to leave a clean-cut corpse for when people find Shuttlepod One after they die.  Trip, however, points out that if he remembers his Honors Biology course correctly then your hair and nails continue to grow after you’re dead.  Reed stops shaving as he realizes the futility of his endeavor.  

Honors Biology, Trip?  Really?  I certainly hope no one’s teaching that in any biology course today let alone one in the twenty-second century.  In my mind, I like to think that Trip was just trying to get Reed to focus on more important things but still, this fun “fact” better not be around in the future.  People seem to love to repeat morbid little facts like this—hell, I know I do—but this thing isn’t even close to true.  And yet I used to hear it all the time.  It’s even mentioned in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, but I can forgive Ros and Guil seeing as how they then claim that toenails never grow at all.  Plus, they can’t even get their own names straight.

I admit, this isn’t so much a mummy myth as it is a dead person in general myth, but it’s one that bugs the hell out of me.  You see, just like every other bodily function, hair and nail growth ceases at death.  Much like the Guild Navigators from Dune need the spice to use their powers, hair and nails need nutrients from the blood to survive.  The blood must flow.  But when you’re dead, your heart stops pumping blood, so your hair and nails stop growing.  Your body starts to decay after death, with skin sloughing off and your hair and nails falling out.  The only things growing on or in you are bacteria and maybe fungi.  However, this myth isn’t based entirely on nothing.  If you google “hair and nails grow after death,” every article that disproves this myth quotes the same thing (and this article will be jumping on that bandwagon): William R. Maples’ Dead Men Do Tell Tales:The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist.  On page thirty-nine, he explains, and dispels, this false factoid:

“It is a myth that fingernails and hair continue to grow after death.  What really happens is that skin may retract around them, making the hair and nails prickle up and jut out more prominently.  Erich Maria Remarque, in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, imagines a dead friend’s nails growing in weird, subterranean corkscrews after his burial.  It is a powerful, disturbing image, but it is pure moonshine.  No such thing occurs.”

So it’s all just an illusion.  If it were true, then every adult male mummy would have a full beard, and that’s just not the case.  Next time you hear someone tells this myth, explain the truth.  It’s a fun little morbid fact, too, with the added benefit of being an actual fact.

Event--Films on Egyptian Artifacts at the CRRL

In the extreme off chance that there's anyone reading this and they happen to be in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area on April 11th, there are two short films showing there about the Cairo Museum and the Egyptian collection at the British Museum:

April 11

Cairo Museum 
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo is a world-renowned cultural center filled with some of the ancient world's most precious artifacts, including the famed burial mask of King Tutankhamun and the Royal Mummies of Luxor. The museum's collection is so large that it has traditionally shown only half of its holdings at any one time. (2010/27 min)

The Egyptian Collection: The Beauty of It All

Fleur Cowles conducts viewers through rooms in the British Museum, explaining particular artifacts and discussing the ancient Egyptians. The Rosetta stone is featured. (1991/26 min)

These films will be shown at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in downtown Fredericksburg.  Their website is here: http://www.librarypoint.org/.  The first film starts at 7 pm and the second starts right after.  This is obviously a local thing that only lasts for one night, but since I work there I kind of wanted to mention it.  I don't know, an employee loyalty thing maybe.

Link—Iceman Photoscan

I don't live in Italy.  This is upsetting to me for many reasons—their accents are way cooler for one—but it also prevents me from getting to traipse up to the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology whenever I want to take a gander at Ötzi the Iceman.  And I can barely afford a plane ticket to go across the country let alone across the ocean, so I probably won't be going there any time soon.  But losers like me are in luck!  There is a website that allows you to get up close and personal (perhaps a little too personal for some parts) with the mummified body of the Iceman: http://www.icemanphotoscan.eu/.

This site allows you to zoom in and see every inch of him up close (if you've been dying to know what his toes look like when your face is shoved into them, this is your chance).  It also has an option to view his tattoos under UV light as well as a 3D viewing of the mummy, but since I don't have 3D glasses I wasn't able to test that out.  The best part is that it's free!  Here's part of the intro page explaining the project: 

This project represents a significant scientific contribution to the study and dissemination of knowledge on the oldest wet and natural mummy in the world. The current preservation conditions of the mummy prevent the wider public from getting close to it. This project, however, will allow an in-depth virtual contact without compromising the sensitive preservation conditions. The objective is to provide an opportunity for the public to discover and study a cultural heritage, unique in the world. In order to ensure the greatest possible access a modern website, which does not require any type of installation or subscription fee, has been set up.

Now, this site has been up for a few years so it's not exactly news.  However, it's a new find to me and I'm excited!  I think this is a brilliant idea and I'm so glad that they're sharing this with the world.  Play around with it, it's fascinating!

The Basics: Mummification—Not just for Egyptian kings

Let’s start with the basics: what is a mummy?  Most people associate the word only with the intentionally preserved bodies found in Egyptian tombs, but there’s a lot more to it.

Intro: Mummies and Why I Like Them

If you were to ever stumble across a dead body, most likely your response will not be “Oh, hey, that’s awesome!”  (Well, maybe for some people it might be, but you might want to back away from them.  Slowly.)  However, if the body’s embalmed, desiccated, and stuck inside a glass case, then there’ll probably be a line out the door to get a glimpse of it.  We tend to be very somber and respectful of the dead, wanting to ensure a peaceful resting place, but when we see something like King Tut our first reaction is “Dude, we’ve got to show this off!”

So, to start, why mummies?  I can’t quite say when I first became interested.  As I kid, I learned about them in school like everyone else and I thought they were creepy but also pretty freaking cool (I also liked learning about disasters such as the Donner Party, Pompeii, and the Titanic, plus I read the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe at age 11, so take that as you will).  I started reading books about them on my own sometime in my teens and ever since then they’ve become a bit of a hobby.  An unusual hobby, of course, not one that can really be discussed at the dinner table (“Hey, look at this picture, his tongue is protruding!  That’s because gases built up during the decay process and—why did you stop eating?  Is there something wrong with the chicken?”).  I almost went into archaeology in order to get a chance at finding a mummy, even though I knew how incredibly unlikely that was and that it’s not something you can specialize in unless you’re really lucky.  Eventually I realized that maybe wanting to dig up corpses wasn’t the greatest reason to start a career.  But I kept reading about mummies and now I have all this random knowledge that’s not particularly useful to my everyday life.  So, of course, the only solution was to start a blog and share this useless knowledge with people wasting time on the Internet.

Mummies are a bit of an odd topic, really.  People are both fascinated and disgusted by them.  They feature as horrifying monsters in movies, but then people gaze in quiet awe at them in museums.  Kids read about them in school with glee but then at home they hide beneath the covers for fear of Yde Girl lurking in the closet.  Mummies are dead people, plain and simple, with sunken faces, shriveled limbs, and parts falling off due to decay, and yet we can’t seem to help looking at them.  Why do we like them?  For one, they put a face on the ancient peoples who came before us, long forgotten and silenced through the passage of time.  But it’s not just their connection to the past that seems to interest people.  We know we’re going to die one day—fade away and be forgotten.  However, mummies have survived past that inevitability in a way, gaining a kind of immortality of the body if not the soul.  Perhaps people study them because mummies have come closest to overcoming that one certainty of life.  Or perhaps we just enjoy staring at morbid things, like how everyone slows down to look at a traffic accident, and then come up with a philosophical reasoning for it later.  Frankly, I prefer the philosophical explanation but, considering the fact that I always flip through a book on mummies to glance at the pictures first before reading anything, maybe there is something else behind that, something more primal that I can’t quite describe.  Either way, I can’t help but look.