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Feb13
30-year-old seen for first time in 3,000 years
Filed under: Uncategorized; Tagged as: ancient, breaking news, chicago, egypt, life, mummy, pyramid, pyramids, Travel
CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — The beautiful singer was about 30 years old when the world forgot about her. But now we know what she looks like for the first time in nearly 3,000 years.The mummy known as Meresamun was entombed nearly 3,000 years ago.
It’s all thanks to one of the most sophisticated CT scanners in the world. Without even cracking open the Egyptian casket, you can now see the smallest details of the woman’s features. Her skin, muscles and bones are intact.
“Her eyes are set far apart, and she has a very full mouth and high cheek bones. You know, I think I could recognize this individual if I saw her in life,” said Michael Vannier, a radiologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Egyptologist Emily Teeter recruited Vannier to help her get a look at the mummy no one had seen. Teeter is a researcher at the Oriental Institute, a small museum on the University of Chicago campus where the mysterious mummy was first brought in 1920.
Researchers had long wanted to know more about the looks of the mummy locked in the coffin. But opening the coffin was not an option.
“It’s impossible to open it without destroying it,” Teeter said.
“A major concern of archeology is preserving evidence intact, and so CT technology is ideal for studying a coffin and mummy like Meresamun,” she said. “It’s so astounding with the advances of CT technology — that with this newest generation of scanner, we can learn so much more about her life, her health and the way she was mummified.”
Teeter had looked at the mummy’s coffin nearly every day over the past 19 years. Through this project, she said, she now looks at the mummy “as an individual instead of just an artifact.”
Today, the mummy is the museum’s star, the highlight of a new exhibit. She’s undergone a high-tech unwrapping in breathtaking detail on film clips produced by Vannier, using a CT scanner normally used for patients who are still alive.
“The first patient we scanned was this mummy,” Vannier said.
He’s taken about 100,000 images. The images border the beautiful and the creepy: an up-close look at someone who died hundreds of years ago. CT scans have been used on mummies before, but they rarely generated such an amazing set of data, Vannier said.
“Many of the mummies had been taken out of their casket for scanning. In this particular case, this casket’s never been opened,” he said. “So everything we’re seeing there has never been seen before — at least not in 2,800 years.”The mummy was discovered in Luxor, Egypt, and sold to the Oriental Institute in the 1920.
Teeter said the coffin, painted and carved to look like the figure of a beautiful woman, is an archeological marvel. She said singers who served in Egyptian temples were traditionally young, beautiful women from high-ranking families.
Hieroglyphs on the front of the coffin tell researchers more about the mummy’s life. The woman’s name was Meresamun, which means “Amun Loves Her,” and she was a singer in the temple of the Egyptian god Amun.
Teeter also said the Oriental Institute’s exhibit highlights the fact that Meresamun was not just another pretty face.
“She was a working woman. She had her job at the temple, and she’d come home,” she said.
Meresamun’s multitasking lifestyle, she said, makes “connections between modern day and ancient life.”
Teeter believes that Meresamun would be pleased that modern medical science has given her new fame.
“One of the ideas in ancient Egypt is to live forever and be remembered by people. She has her wish,” Teeter said.
The only thing that remains a mystery is how she died. Vannier said there are no signs of trauma to the body, and his only theory is that she died of some kind of infectious disease.
He’s most surprised by how perfect her teeth are, suggesting that she didn’t follow our modern-day high-sugar diet. She didn’t have a single cavity.
“I think the thing that we learned that was very surprising, at least to me, was the fact that our dental disease is obviously related to our diet,” he said. “She obviously had no refined sugars. A lot of the things that they ate were grain and more fresh materials.”
He said what they’ve learned is astonishing. “We had some expectations, but they’ve all been so far exceeded. We’re really not sure where the limit of all of this is.”
No CommentsFeb9Israel warplanes bomb Gaza after rocket attacks
Filed under: World; Tagged as: breaking news, egypt, government, israel, middle east, Military, palestinian, Politics, united states, war
GAZA (Reuters) – Israel said it launched air strikes on two Hamas outposts in the Gaza Strip on Monday in retaliation for rocket attacks on the Jewish state.The air strikes were mounted on the eve of an Israeli election in which security is a major issue.
Palestinians said at least one Israeli missile hit a building used by Hamas police. There were no reports of any casualties.
The Israeli military said the air strikes were in response to two rockets fired at southern Israel from the Hamas-run Palestinian coastal enclave on Sunday. The rockets caused damage but there were no casualties.
A fragile ceasefire has been in place since Israel ended a 22-day military offensive in Gaza on January 18 that was designed to punish the Islamist Hamas group for cross-border rocket and mortar bomb attacks.
Egypt is trying to secure a lasting ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Diplomats said the Egyptian proposal includes a prisoner exchange and the initial opening of at least two of the enclave’s border crossings.
With his opinion poll lead narrowing ahead of Tuesday’s parliamentary election, right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu has stressed Israelis’ fears of Arab attacks and said government plans to trade land for peace were doomed to failure.
His main opponent, the centrist Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni, said she would continue the U.S.-sponsored peace process with the Palestinians that she pursued as foreign minister — an outcome favored by the new Obama administration in Washington.
No CommentsFeb4No CommentsNEW YORK – Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie “Anaconda.” Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.
“This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus,” enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.“It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately.”
“If it tried to enter my office to eat me, it would have a hard time squeezing through the door,” reckoned paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Missisauga.
Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said. Head is senior author of a report on the find in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
(The same issue carries another significant report from the distant past. Scientists said they’d found the oldest known evidence of animal life, remnants of steroids produced by sponges more than 635 million years ago in Oman.)
The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis (”ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss”). That means “titanic boa from Cerrejon,” the region where it was found.
While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.
Conrad, who wasn’t involved in the discovery, called the find “just unbelievable…. It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get.”
Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.
The beast was revealed in early 2007 at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Bones collected at a huge open-pit coal mine in Colombia were being unpacked, said Bloch, the museum’s curator of vertebrate paleontology.
Graduate students unwrapping the fossils “realized they were looking at the bones of a snake. Not only a snake, but a really big snake.”
So they quickly consulted the skeleton of a 17-foot anaconda for comparison. A backbone from that creature is about the size of a silver dollar, Bloch said, while a backbone from Titanoboa is “the size of a large Florida grapefruit.”
So far the scientists have found about 180 fossils of backbone and ribs that came from about two dozen individual snakes, and now they hope to go back to Colombia to find parts of the skull, Bloch said.
Titanoboa’s size gives clues about its environment. A snake’s size is related to how warm its environment is. The fossils suggest equatorial temperatures in its day were significantly warmer than they are now, during a time when the world as a whole was warmer. So equatorial temperatures apparently rose along with the global levels, in contrast to the competing hypothesis that they would not go up much, Head noted.
“It’s a leap” to apply the conditions of the past to modern climate change, Head said. But given that, the finding still has “some potentially scary implications for what we’re doing to the climate today,” he said.
The finding suggest the equatorial regions will warm up along with the planet, he said.
“We won’t have giant snakes, however, because we are removing most of their habitats by development and deforestation” in equatorial regions, he said.