(Andrew Holt/ALAMY) – A srugeon in Britain argues that features of Tutankhamen’s body may help explain why the boy king died while still a teenager.

 But all of these theories have missed one vital point, says Hutan Ashrafian, a surgeon with an interest in medical history at Imperial College London. Tutankhamen died young with a feminized physique, and so did his immediate predecessors.

Paintings and sculptures show that Smenkhkare, a pharaoh who may have been Tutankhamun’s uncle or older brother, and Akhenaten, thought to have been the boy king’s father, both had feminized figures, with unusually large breasts and wide hips. Two pharaohs who came before Akhenaten — Amenhotep III and Tuthmosis IV — seem to have had similar physiques. All of these kings died young and mysteriously, says Ashrafian. “There are so many theories, but they’ve focused on each pharaoh individually.”

Ashrafian found that each pharaoh died at a slightly younger age than his predecessor, which suggests an inherited disorder, he says. Historical accounts associated with the individuals hint at what that disorder may have been.

“It’s significant that two [of the five related pharaohs] had stories of religious visions associated with them,” says Ashrafian. People with a form of epilepsy in which seizures begin in the brain’s temporal lobe are known to experience hallucinations and religious visions, particularly after exposure to sunlight. It’s likely that the family of pharaohs had a heritable form of temporal lobe epilepsy, he says.

This diagnosis would also account for the feminine features. The temporal lobe is connected to parts of the brain involved in the release of hormones, and epileptic seizures are known to alter the levels of hormones involved in sexual development. This might explain the development of the pharaohs’ large breasts. A seizure might also be to blame for Tutankhamen’s fractured leg, says Ashrafian.

Tuthmosis IV had a religious experience in the middle of a sunny day, recorded in the Dream Stele, an inscription near the Great Sphinx in Giza. But his visions were nothing compared with those experienced by Akhenaten. They encouraged Akhenaten to raise the status of a minor deity called the “sun-disk,” or Aten, into a supreme god — abandoning the ancient Egyptian polytheistic traditions to start what is thought to be the earliest recorded monotheistic religion. If Ashrafian’s theory is correct, Akhenaten’s religious experiment and Tutankhamen’s premature death may both have been a consequence of a medical condition.

“People with temporal lobe epilepsy who are exposed to sunlight get the same sort of stimulation to the mind and religious zeal,” says Ashrafian.

“It’s a fascinating and plausible explanation,” says Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. However, the theory is almost impossible to prove, he adds, given that there is no definitive genetic test for epilepsy.

Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, says the theory must remain speculative.

“The exact timing of Akhenaten’s religious conviction is not so clearly documented, and most cases of sudden religious conversion are not due to epilepsy,” he says. “Monotheism could be related to epilepsy, or bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or drug intoxication from a fungus — but this paper does not sway me to any of these options.”

Markel agrees: “Do we know that a seizure led to monotheism? It’s a nice idea, but we don’t know,” he says. “It’s a very interesting hypothesis, but it’s just that — there’s no definite proof.”

David Shukman visits the Ny-Alesund research base in Svalbard

Scientists in the Arctic are warning that this summer’s record-breaking melt is part of an accelerating trend with profound implications.

Norwegian researchers report that the sea ice is becoming significantly thinner and more vulnerable.

Last month, the annual thaw of the region’s floating ice reached the lowest level since satellite monitoring began, more than 30 years ago.

It is thought the scale of the decline may even affect Europe’s weather.

The melt is set to continue for at least another week – the peak is usually reached in mid-September – while temperatures here remain above freezing.

‘Unprecedented’

The Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) is at the forefront of Arctic research and its international director, Kim Holmen, told the BBC that the speed of the melting was faster than expected.

“It is a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago,” Dr Holmen said.

“And it has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us.”

The institute has been deploying its icebreaker, Lance, to research conditions between Svalbard and Greenland – the main route through which ice flows out of the Arctic Ocean.

During a visit to the port, one of the scientists involved, Dr Edmond Hansen, told me he was “amazed” at the size and speed of this year’s melt.

“As a scientist, I know that this is unprecedented in at least as much as 1,500 years. It is truly amazing – it is a huge dramatic change in the system,” Dr Hansen said.

“This is not some short-lived phenomenon – this is an ongoing trend. You lose more and more ice and it is accelerating – you can just look at the graphs, the observations, and you can see what’s happening.”

Thinner ice

I interviewed Dr Hansen while the Lance was docked at Norway’s Arctic research station at Ny-Alesund on Svalbard.

Key data on the ice comes from satellites but also from measurements made by a range of different techniques – a mix of old and new technology harnessed to help answer the key environmental questions of our age.

The Norwegians send teams out on to the floating ice to drill holes into it and extract cores to determine the ice’s origin.

And since the early 90s they have installed specialist buoys, tethered to the seabed, which use sonar to provide a near-constant stream of data about the ice above.

An electro-magnetic device known as an EM-Bird has also been flown, suspended beneath a helicopter, in long sweeps over the ice.

The torpedo-shaped instrument gathers data about the difference between the level of the seawater beneath the ice and the surface of the ice itself.

By flying transects over the ice, a picture of its thickness emerges. The latest data is still being processed but one of the institute’s sea ice specialists, Dr Sebastian Gerland, said that though conditions vary year by year a pattern is clear.

“In the region where we work we can see a general trend to thinner ice – in the Fram Strait and at some coastal stations.”

Where the ice vanishes entirely, the surface loses its usual highly reflective whiteness – which sends most solar radiation back into space – and is replaced by darker waters instead which absorb more heat.

According to Dr Gerland, additional warming can take place even if ice remains in a far thinner state.

“It means there is more light penetrating through the ice – that depends to a high degree on the snow cover but once it has melted the light can get through,” Dr Gerland said.

“If the ice is thinner there is more light penetrating and that light can heat the water.”

 

4/6

The most cautious forecasts say that the Arctic might become ice-free in the summer by the 2080s or 2090s. But recently many estimates for that scenario have been brought forward.

Early research investigating the implications suggests that a massive reduction in sea ice is likely to have an impact on the path of the jet stream, the high-altitude wind that guides weather systems, including storms.

The course and speed of the jet stream is governed by the difference in temperature between the Tropics and the Arctic, so a change on the scale being observed now could be felt across Europe and beyond.

Kim Holmen of the NPI explained how the connection might work.

“When the Arctic is ice free, it is not white any more and it will absorb more sunlight and that change will influence wind systems and where the precipitation comes.

“For northern Europe it could mean much more precipitation, while southern Europe will become drier so there are large scale shifts across the entire continent.”

That assessment is mirrored by work at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, based in the British town of Reading.

The centre’s director-general, Alan Thorpe, said the link between the Arctic melt and European weather was complicated but it is now the subject of research.

“Where Arctic sea ice is reducing in summer – and if we have warmer than average sea surface temperatures in the north-west Atlantic – these twin factors together lead to storms being steered over the UK in summer which is not the normal situation and leads to our poorer summers.”

But the research is in its earliest stages. For science, the Arctic itself is hard to decipher. The effects of its rapid melt are even tougher.

You can see David’s coverage from the Arctic on BBC News on Friday – on television, on radio and online. Photographs by Mark Georgiou

Pressure in Mount Fuji is now higher than last eruption, warn experts

 

The pressure in Mount Fuji’s magma chamber is now higher than it was in 1707, the last time the nearly 4,000-metre-high Japanese volcano erupted, causing volcanologists to speculate that a disaster is imminent.

The new readings, taken by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, reveal that the pressure is at 1.6 megapascals, nearly 16 times the 0.1 megapascals it takes to trigger an eruption.

This, lead volcanologist on the case Eisuke Fujita told Kyodo News, is “not a small figure”.

Researchers have speculated for some time that the volcano, located on Honshu Island 100km southwest of Tokyo, is overdue an eruption. In 2000 and 2001 a series of low magnitude earthquakes were recorded beneath the volcano, leading to widespread predictions of an imminent blow. Since the March 2011 tsunami and the 6.4 magnitude earthquake that followed four days later, Japan has been on tenterhooks, and in May 2012 a professor from Ryukyu University warned that a massive eruption within three years would be likely because of several major factors: steam and gases are being emitted from the crater, water eruptions are occurring nearby, massive holes emitting hot natural gases are appearing in the vicinity and finally, the warning sign that pushed the professor to make the announcement, a 34km-long fault was found underneath the volcano. The fault, experts suggested, could indicate a total collapse of the mountainside if there is another significant shift, and it would probably cause a collapse in the event of an eruption, leading to huge mud and landslides.

The new readings prove that the localised tectonic shifts of 2011 have indeed put immense pressure on the magma chamber, but the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention has qualified its warning by noting that pressure is just one contributory factor to an eruption. The 1707 quake, however, was itself caused by a recent earthquake that amped up the pressure in its magma chamber.

“It’s possible for Mount Fuji to erupt even several years after the March 2011 earthquake, therefore we need to be careful about the development,” a representative said.

A 2004 government report originally estimated that an eruption would cost the country £19.6 billion. However, new studies are underway by Honshu Island’s Shizuoka prefectural government. The study is focussing on the potential damage that would be caused by a series of simultaneous earthquakes in the Tokai, Tonankai and Nankai regions located along the Nankai Trough, where it is feared another earthquake will soon take place. The most recent models,have revealed that, in the worst-case scenario, 323,000 people would die and the tremors could trigger an eruption at Mount Fuji.

Regions that would be affected, including Kanagawa, Yamanashi and Shizuoka, plan to hold a test run of an evacuation by 2014, with a meeting of local governments covering progress of the plans and of shelter preparations slated for April 2013.

(Reuters) – A British plan to drill into a sunless lake deep under Antarctica’s ice in December could show the risks of quicker sea level rise caused by climate change scientists said on Friday.

Sediments on the bed of Lake Ellsworth, which is several hundred meters (yards) below sea level and buried under 3 km (1.6 miles) of ice, may include bits of ancient seashells that could be dated to reveal when the ice sheet last broke up.

Experts say the West Antarctic ice sheet over the lake contains enough ice to raise world sea levels by 3-5 meters if it ever broke up – a threat to low-lying areas from Bangladesh to Florida, from Buenos Aires to Shanghai.

“Society needs to know the risk of a collapse,” of the ice sheet, said Martin Siegert, of the University of Bristol and principal investigator for the mission that will also look for unknown life forms in a rivalry with Russian and U.S. scientists.

There are 360 known sub-glacial lakes in Antarctica – formed by heat from the Earth melting the bottom of the ice.

“One way to find out (the risks of collapse) is to know when it last happened,” he said of the mission that has been in the planning stages for 16 years. “We are finally ready to hit the ‘go’ button,” he said.

“We set foot on the ice again in October and hope to bring samples to the surface in December 2012,” Chris Hill, program manager at the British Antarctic Survey, said in a statement.

Siegert said no one knew the age of the West Antarctic ice. It might have broken up in naturally warmer periods about 125,000 years ago, 440,000 years ago or a million years ago – all times when sea levels were higher than today.

HIPPOPOTAMUS

Most worrying would be if the ice collapsed in the Eemian period 125,000 years ago when temperatures were slightly higher than now, hippopotamuses bathed in the Rhine and world sea levels were 4 to 6 meters higher than today.

That could be a sign that the ice sheet was very vulnerable to a collapse caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

Most scientists reckon that Greenland, with enough ice to raise world sea levels by 7 meters if it thawed over hundreds of years, is more vulnerable than West Antarctica.

The far bigger East Antarctic ice sheet, with enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 50 meters, is coldest and most stable. Sea levels rose by 17 cm (7 inches) last century but many scientists say the rate might pick up to a meter this century.

Siegert said the plan to drill into the lake sediments had received little attention compared to the goal of seeing if microbial life had evolved in the darkness under the ice.

That might increase the chances of finding life elsewhere in the solar system, such as on Jupiter’s ice-swathed moon Europa. The scientists aim to use a hot water drill and take samples in a sterilized titanium container.

Russia drilled through to the Vostok Lake in East Antarctica early this year and its scientists plan to return in 2013 to get samples.

U.S. scientists plan to sample the Whillans sub-glacial lake “around mid-January” 2013, said John Priscu of Montana State University.

He said that the mission would send down a robot vehicle to sample the lake, keeping the borehole open for about two weeks unlike the British plan for faster sampling over a few days.

“The Russians have no clean samples from Vostok this time,” he told Reuters. “The only samples they have that I am aware of is water, mixed with kerosene drilling fluid.”

Siegert played down the three-nation competition. “We don’t really regard it as a race. But all of science is driven by people who want to be first,” he said.

A low humming noise, is keeping the residents awake in West Seattle, US.

Julie Schickling, could not explain the noise she heard. on her porch. So she has recorded it. Check the link to hear..http://westseattleblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/duwamish-noise.m4a

This is the continuation of the strange rumbles and noises being reported across the Globe.

Some neighbours said the noise even shook them out of bed. Nearby industrial units say they are not to blame. What is?

Nox.

Archaeologists Uncover ‘Lost Garden’ in Quest for Richard III

(Reuters) – Two shallow 5.6 magnitude earthquakes hit southwestern China on Friday, killing at least 50 people and forcing tens of thousands of people from damaged buildings, state media said.

The quakes struck near the border of Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, the first one at 11:19 a.m. (0319 GMT) and the second one about 45 minutes later, the U.S. Geological survey(USGS) said.

About 150 people were injured and 20,000 homes damaged, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Most of the victims were from Yiliang county, Yunnan province, near the epicenter of the quakes, which struck at a depth of about 9 km (5.6 miles) according to the USGS.

By mid-afternoon, authorities had moved more than 100,000 from the area as a series of aftershocks struck. No deaths were reported in Guizhou province.

Calls to police stations and hospitals in Yiliang went unanswered, but a worker at No. 2 Renmin Hospital in Zhaotong city said medical staff were treating the injured.

“We have admitted injured people, but don’t have an overall number yet, and we can’t comment without government approval,” he told Reuters, declining to give his name.

Buildings in China’s less developed regions are often thrown up with little regard for construction standards, making them susceptible to earthquakes.

In 2008, about 87,600 people were killed in the southwestern province of Sichuan when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit. Many of the victims died in the rubble of homes and schools built without adequate steel reinforcement.

A 6.9 magnitude earthquake in April 2010 killed nearly 3,000 people in a remote part of western Qinghai province, devastating much of Yushu county, where many displaced by the disaster still live in tents.

Quakes with an epicenter less than 70 km below the surface are considered shallow and can cause significant damage, even at lower magnitudes.

Christchurch, the largest city in New Zealand’s South Island, is still recovering from a 5-km-deep quake measuring 6.3 which killed 182 people in February 2011.

Source: Reuters

This is evidence of an ongoing Global uptick in Earthquake activity. We are now entering a potentially dangerous seismic window. Have preparedness plans ready, especially if near fault lines, or coasts. Nox