User Datas & Informations

May 31st, 2008 by Mylo

Jeff sez, “Researchers often use Photoshop to clean up the images they produce in the laboratory. If the experiment didn’t go quite right, a bit of tampering can make a gel look like things did work. Editors at Science, Nature, and other journals are turning into detectives, using new tools to hunt for fraudulent images.”

And the level of tampering they find is alarming. “The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal,” says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help them detect image manipulation. Doctored images are troubling because they can mislead scientists and even derail a search for the causes and cures of disease.

Ten to 20 of the articles accepted by The Journal of Clinical Investigation each year show some evidence of tampering, and about five to 10 of those papers warrant a thorough investigation, says Ms. Neill. (The journal publishes about 300 to 350 articles per year.)

May 24th, 2008 by Mylo

The ghost of an Ancient Egyptian toddler now haunts a London gallery, after scans of his mummy were fashioned into a work of art.

Artist Angela Palmer has already turned Carol Vorderman’s brain, and even her own, into eerie artistic representations, formed from layers of glass that have been engraved with contours based on scans of their brains.

Now she has used the same method to bring the remains of the toddler into view and shed new light on a family tragedy that took place almost two thousand years ago in Egypt.

Her reconstruction of “Mummy Boy 3″ is now on display at Waterhouse & Dodd in the West End of London, until June 12.

She had originally wanted to scan the head of the boy king Tutenkhamum, but was told that request was out of the question.

However, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford allowed her unprecedented access to the mummy to shed new light on the toddler’s death in Roman times.

“It is an exquisite mummy,” says Ms Palmer. Working with Dr Helen Whitehouse of The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2500 images of the little mummy were taken with an CT X ray scanner in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, to create the stacked glass sculpture.

“As you move around it, the mummy disappears from view, in an ethereal effect,” she says.

As a bonus, the effort has revealed to archaeologists new details of the mummy. The remains were of an 18 month old and it was a boy, as shown by his mummified penis.

Unusually, he lacked his baby side teeth. His brain had also been removed, in common with standard funerary practices of the day.

The scans show that the elaborate bandages that wrap the remains, forming an elaborate lozenge pattern, are typical of the approach used in AD 80-120.

The presence of gold studs of gilded plaster, bound near his lap, suggest that the little boy was the son of a noble or an official.

Exhibited alongside the resulting see through sculpture, built up from glass engraved with the scans, are the mummy itself, along with films and photographs taken by the artist of local boys from the village of Hawara, south west of Cairo.

It was there that the mummy was found in 1888 by the British archaeologist W. M. F. Petrie, while excavating around the royal pyramid of Pharaoh Amenemhet III (1818–1770 BC).

Poignant relics from a 100 acre cemetery there, from toys to tiny shoes and clothes, testify to how around quarter of children at that time did not survive beyond their first year, comments Dr Whitehouse, adding that diseases, insects, malaria and parasitic worms were prevalent until the 20th century.

The precise cause of death are not clear, though the child had a problem with his right hip, and had an inflamed lung, consistent with pneumonia.

January 10th, 2008 by Mylo

Ever since the discovery of the bust of Nefertiti, this beautiful limestone portrait has been regarded as one of the greatest art masterpieces in the world. It was found in the atelier of the famed ancient Egyptian sculptor Thutmose at Tel el Amarna
, by the German expedition of 1912. Chief archaeologist Ludwig Borchard was so awed by its stunning beauty, that he devised a scheme to smuggle the piece out of Egypt.

Every archaeological discovery had in those days to be brought before the Egyptian Antiquities Authority for inventory and distribution between Egypt and the archaeological expedition. This committee supervised the split between the objects that stayed in Egypt and those that were allowed to leave the country. Borchard did not clean the bust and intentionally covered it in gypsum to make it look of lesser worth when he presented it to the Egyptian authorities for the partition.The painted limestone bust was put on exhibit in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum in 1923, eleven years after its discovery. The Egyptian government has since made attempts to have the bust returned, but Germany has so far refused. Even Hitler felt in love with the non Arian Egyptian lady, and announced that it would remain in Germany forever.Nefertiti has been in Germany for nine decades. Visitors come from all over the world to admire her eternal beauty. Hopefully, in the near future, she will return to her homeland and the new Grand Egyptian Museum. Almost a century after the amazing discovery of the bust of Nefertiti, the meaning of her name still holds the promise of her return: “The Beautiful One has Come”.