Relics From Royal Graves Found in Museum Basement
dailymail - Relics from the tomb of medieval English king Richard II and sketches of his skull and bones have been discovered in boxes in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery.
Objects thought to have come from inside the tomb were found inside a cigarette box by archivists cataloguing the papers of the gallery's first director, Sir George Scharf.
The box contained fragments of wood, possibly from the coffin itself, and a piece of leather, thought to have been part of the king's glove.
Archivists say that the leather matches the gallery director's sketch of a glove which was contained inside the coffin.
The gallery's director was invited to see the opening of the royal graves at Westminster Abbey and the date on the cigarette box - August 31, 1871 - matches that of his visit.
The gallery's founding director, who frequently attended the opening of graves and witnessed those of Richard II, Edward VI, Henry VII, James I and Elizabeth of York, also made careful sketches of the skull and bones of the king, with detailed measurements.
Krzysztof Adamiec, National Portrait Gallery assistant archivist, said: ‘It was a very exciting discovery and one that reveals the hidden potential of Scharf's papers.
‘By matching diary entries, with sketches, notes and other material in the collection a unique record is revealed. Scharf meticulously recorded almost everything he saw and experienced.’
Sir George Scharf was appointed in 1857, shortly after the gallery was founded. His papers cover the first 38 years of the institution's existence.
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Nuclear research inquiry condemns organ harvesting
The Great Beyond - A catalogue of dubious practices has been exposed today by a report into how organs came to be removed illegally from the dead bodies of British nuclear workers for testing without proper consent.
Chris Huhne, the Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, said the events detailed in today’s publication of the Redfern Inquiry “should never have happened in the first place”.
Lawyer Michael Redfern was appointed in 2007 to investigate how tissues from nuclear workers were removed and analysed between 1955 and 1992. His inquiry found that organs from workers at a number of nuclear sites were removed and taken for analysis at the Sellafield nuclear facility. Other samples were taken from members of the public, some of whom lived near nuclear sites and others selected at random.
“Organs were removed at post mortem and provided for analysis despite being of no possible relevance to the cause of death,” says the final report of the inquiry. “The results of radiochemical analysis were seldom taken into account when the death was certified: they were important not for the coronial investigation but primarily for research.”
Body parts are only supposed to be removed by coroners if they may relate to the cause of death, unless permission is sought.
Redfern places most of the blame on pathologists who performed the post mortems at which organs were removed without satisfying themselves that consent from relatives had been given.
In a statement, Peter Furness, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, says, “We believe that the work was undertaken in good faith, in the understanding that it was work with potential to benefit the population of the UK as a whole. Nevertheless, we fully acknowledge that post mortem tissue should not have been removed in this way. We deeply regret that the discovery that tissue was removed without knowledge or consent has caused distress to the bereaved.”
The main researcher involved in the work at Sellafield was Geoffrey Schofield, the medical officer at Sellafield until his death in 1985, who was succeed by Adam Lawson, who also worked at Sellafield. The Redfern Inquiry says Schofield “appears to have taken somewhat dubious steps to obtain organs” and that there is no evidence that either Schofield or Lawson “gave any thought at all to the ethical implications of his work”. It also notes that they did not attempt to conceal their work and that it was “not fully appreciated” that the law did not allow removal of organs for research without obtaining relatives' consent.
Data on some of the organs were sent to United States in an “obvious breach of confidence”, says the report.
Some of the data obtained in these tests have already been used to improve a formula used to calculate radiation exposure for nuclear workers. Despite the circumstances in which it was gathered, the inquiry decided against destroying the data, as requested by some families.
“The Inquiry acknowledges their deeply felt concerns but believes that destruction would be inappropriate: the data are potentially of great benefit to those working in the nuclear industry and should be made available, anonymised, for use in appropriate research,” says the report.
Since the events detailed in the report, the UK passed new legislation in the form of the 2004 Human Tissue Act that tightened regulations on the use of human tissues. “I hope that the families of those involved can take some comfort from the knowledge that the practices that this Inquiry examined simply would not be permissible today,” said Huhne.
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Is Saturn's Titan Producing DNA in its Atmosphere Without Water? Experts Say "Yes"
dailygalaxy - Saturn's moon Titan has many of the components for life without liquid water. But the orange hydrocarbon haze that shrouds Saturn's largest moon could be creating the molecules that make up DNA without the help of water – an ingredient widely thought to be necessary for the molecules' formation according to a new study.
The researchers warn however that although Titan's atmosphere is creating these molecules, that doesn't mean that the molecules are combining to form life, But the finding could entice astrobiologists to consider a wider range of extrasolar planets as potential hosts for at least simple forms of organic life, the team of scientists from the US and France suggests.
The new findings also suggest that billions of years ago Earth's upper atmosphere – not just the so-called primordial soup on the surface – may have been the sources for these "prebiotic" molecules, amino acids and the so-called nucleotide bases that make up DNA.
"We're really starting to get a sense for what kind of chemistry an atmosphere is capable of" performing, says Sarah Hörst, a graduate student in planetary science at the University of Arizona, who led the research effort.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has detected large molecules at altitudes of some 600 miles above Titan's surface. But the molecules are so far unidentified because of limitations to the craft's instruments. The Cassini research team replicated Titan's atmosphere in a large chamber at the temperatures present in the moon's upper atmosphere. To play the role of the sun's ultraviolet light hitting Titan's atmosphere, they used radio energy at a power level comparable to a modestly bright light bulb. The UV light is critical because it breaks up molecules such as molecular nitrogen or carbon monoxide in Titan's atmosphere, leaving the individual atoms to choose up different partners, forming new molecules.
The experiment yielded tiny aerosol particles. The team ran the particles through a sensitive mass spectrometer, which showed the chemical formulas for the molecules that made up the aerosols.Hörst then ran the formulas past a roster of molecules biologically important for life on Earth. She got 18 hits, including the four nucleotides whose combinations form an organism's genetic information encoded in DNA. It appears to be less important that water is present to form these molecules than it is for some form of oxygen to be present in the mix of ingredients, she concluded.
On Earth, oxygen early in the planet's pre-life history would come in the form of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from volcanic activity, as well as from water released by volcanism and through meteor and comet impacts. On Titan, the oxygen appears to be coming from Enceladus, an ice-bound moon of Saturn in its own right because of icy geysers spewing into space from near its south pole. Some researchers think the geysers hint at a possible global subsurface sea and a potential habitat for life.
Last year, researchers showed how water molecules ejected as part of Enceladus's geysers can be carried great distances through the Saturn system, with some oxygen-bearing molecules finding their way to Titan.
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Mumia: Egyptian Mummies as a drug
mindhacks - An 1927 article from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine about the long history of using Egyptian mummies as drugs.
The fact that powdered embalmed corpse from Ancient Egypt has never been shown to have any curative or mind altering properties hasn’t prevented an enthusiasm for the substance which has lasted many thousands of years.
Avicenna (980-1037) describes mumia as useful for a variety of purposes, including abscesses, eruptions, fractures, concussions, paralysis, affections of the throat, lungs and heart, debility of the stomach, disorders of the liver and spleen, and as an antidote for poisons. As a drug, however, he never prescribes it alone, but always mixed with some herb, or in some convenient vehicle, such as wine, milk, butter, or oil.
The demand for mummies as drugs apparently reached such heights that it inspired mass grave robbing and eventually fraud as traders decided it was more profitable to kill slaves, stuff them with bitumen and dry their bodies in the sun. The flesh was fraudulently sold as genuine ancient mummy.
The medicine is mentioned everywhere from apothecary books to Shakespeare and seems to have been thought beneficial well into the 18th century.
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Is this proof that auras are real?
newscientist - Glowing visions of light that emanate from a person's body, often seen by those claiming to be psychic, really do exist, for some people at least. That's the tantalising conclusion of a study on a new form of emotion-colour synaesthesia which projects itself as coloured auras.
Other forms of synaesthesia include numbers and letters that evoke colours, touch that evokes emotions and colours with their own fragrances. Now, Vilayanur Ramachandran and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, have identified a new type of synaesthesia in a man whose emotions give rise to colours, which can take the form of auras surrounding other people.
The synaesthete in question, anonymously called RF, is a 23 year-old male who has a mild form of autism called Asperger's syndrome.
At the age of 10, RF's mum told him to try to match a colour with each of his emotions in an effort to aid his previous inability to identify and communicate his emotions. Having followed her advice, RF soon reported actually seeing the colours in his mind when he felt different emotions.
This evolved over a number of years until he described experiencing "auras of colour" around other people depending on the emotion he related to them. He says that everyone's aura is blue to begin with, and changes as soon as he associates a particular emotion with them.
To test RF's seemingly self-generated synaesthesia, Ramachandran's team placed a female volunteer against a white background. They proceeded to draw an outline around her body with a black pen.
Surprisingly, RF reported seeing the volunteer's aura fill the space from her body to the line, no matter how far away from the body the line was drawn.
Next, the team projected either blue or orange letters onto the white background at varying points around the volunteer, either inside or outside of the black line. They asked RF to state what the letter was while timing the speed of his response.
When the letter was blue and inside the black line RF was twice as slow at naming the letter as any other position or colour.
Luke Miller, who presented the study at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego this week, says that the blue letters projected inside the black line are likely to have merged with the perceived blue aura making them more difficult to identify than those outside of the line or coloured orange.
"Some people who claim to be psychic may be telling the truth when they say they can see auras, perhaps they are on this spectrum of synaesthesia," says Elizabeth Seckel, who also worked on the project. They could be empathising with another person's emotions and projecting this onto the person as a coloured aura, adds Miller.
Miller has come across subsequent people who claim to have similar emotion-colour synaesthesia, but is yet to test their abilities. The team hope to next use MRI scans to find out which areas of the brain may be responsible for the illusion, although they hypothesise that the auras arise from cross-activation between the V4 area of the brain responsible for colour perception and the insular cortex, due to its role in the subjective experience of emotion.
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The Hidden Face at Machu Picchu
(plant tongue firmly in cheek)
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I received the following flyer from Rick Spears at Rick Spears Art. Check out his website...lot's of great art work. His pieces are displayed worldwide...conceptual art, 2D/3D design, model-building, sculpting, molding, casting, exhibit fabrication, graphic design, animation, writing, storyboarding and planetarium show production.
