Mummy Cemetery

Toronto— She's literally one in a million.

The remains of a child, laid to rest more than 1,500 years ago when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt, was found in an ancient cemetery that contains more than 1 million mummies, according to a team of archaeologists from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

The cemetery is now called Fag el-Gamous, which means "Way of the Water Buffalo," a title that comes from the name of a nearby road. Archaeologists from Brigham Young University have been excavating Fag el-Gamous, along with a nearby pyramid, for about 30 years. Many of the mummies date to the time when the Roman or Byzantine Empire ruled Egypt, from the 1st century to the 7th century A.D. [See photos of the million-mummy cemetery]

"We are fairly certain we have over a million burials within this cemetery. It's large, and it's dense," Project Director Kerry Muhlestein, an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University, said in a paper he presented at the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities Scholars Colloquium, which was held last month in Toronto.

This cemetery was not a burial ground for kings or royalty. The people buried here were often laid to rest without grave goods, and without coffins for that matter, the researchers said. The deceased's internal organs were rarely removed; instead, it was the arid natural environment that mummified them. "I don't think you would term what happens to these burials as true mummification," Muhlestein said. "If we want to use the term loosely, then they were mummified."

Despite the low status of the dead, the researchers found some remarkably beautiful items, including linen, glass and even colorful booties designed for a child.

"A lot of their wealth, as little as they had, was poured into these burials," Muhlestein said.

The mummified child was buried with several other mummies. It was wrapped in a tunic and wore a necklace with two bracelets on each arm.

"There was some evidence that they tried much of the full mummification process. The toes and toenails and brain and tongue were amazingly preserved," the researchers wrote on the project's Facebook page. "The jewelry makes us think it was a girl, but we cannot tell."

Researchers estimate the infant was 18 months old when she died. "She was buried with great care, as someone who obviously loved her very much did all they could to take care of this little girl in burial," the researchers wrote. It's "very sad, but they succeeded. It was a beautiful burial."

Million mummy mystery

Where exactly these million mummies came from is an ongoing mystery, and one that the team has yet to solve. A nearby village seems too small to warrant such a large cemetery, the researchers said. There is an ancient town named Philadelphia (so named after King Ptolemy II Philadelphus) not far away, but that town has burial sites of its own. [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]

While there is a small pyramid nearby, it was built more than 4,500 years ago, which is more than two millennia before the cemetery was first used.

"It's hard to know where all these people were coming from," Muhlestein told Live Science.

A mummy over 7 feet tall

The stories that these million mummies tell appear endless. The Brigham Young team has excavated more than 1,000 of the mummies over the past 30 years, and Muhlestein admits the team has a publishing backlog.

One discovery that hasn't been published is of a mummy who is more than 7 feet (2 meters) tall. "We once found a male who was over 7 feet tall who was far too tall to fit into the shaft, so they bent him in half and tossed him in," Muhlestein told the audience in Toronto. 

That's an extraordinary height given the generally poor nutrition these people had, Muhlestein told Livescience in an interview, adding that "even with great nutrition, it's really unusual" for an individual to reach that height. The great height could be because of a medical condition that caused an excess of growth hormone, but more research needs to be done to determine this.

This surprisingly tall mummy was discovered before Muhlestein became director, and the findings have yet to be published, he said. "We have a large publishing backlog, [and] we're trying to catch up on making our colleagues and the public aware [of the finds]."

Blond and redheaded mummies

While excavating and publishing the discoveries from the cemetery pose daunting challenges, they also provide archaeologists with terrific opportunities.

For instance, the team is in the early stages of creating a database of all the mummies it has excavated. When complete, the database will help the researchers study burial patterns in the area.

While the database is in the early stages, it has already provided some intriguing initial results. Muhlestein said he and the other researchers can use the database to "show us all of the blond burials, and [it shows] they are clustered in one area, or all of the red-headed burials, and [it shows] they're clustered in another area."

These clusters are interesting because they suggest "perhaps we have family areas or genetic groups [in certain areas], but we're still trying to explore that," Muhlestein said.

Ebola Epidemic Continues in Africa

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has undergone a dramatic change in the past several months, U.S. health officials said today (Dec. 22).

There has been "real progress" in the fight against the deadly viral disease, but eliminating Ebola will require much more work, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters.

"The response is inspiring, but the challenges are sobering," said Frieden, who just returned from a trip to the region of West Africa affected by the outbreak.

In Guinea, officials with Doctors Without Borders said they'd seen "the scariest thing I've heard," Frieden said: For the first time since the outbreak began, there were not enough beds for sick patients in treatment centers in the capital city of Conakry.

And in Sierra Leone, at least 10 people die every day in their communities, rather than in treatment centers, Frieden said. The number of people dying in communities is important because those deaths indicate the region faces a greater risk that the disease will spread to others, compared with places where most deaths occur in treatment centers.

Of the three countries hit hardest by the outbreak — Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia — Sierra Leone now has the most cases of Ebola, he said. However, in the country's capital city Freetown, there is now an "impressive" command center that is staffed by about 100 people, Frieden said. If the outbreak in Freetown proceeds similarly to how it did in Liberia's capital city of Monrovia, then within the next few weeks, there should be a significant decrease in cases, he said.

Of the three countries, the most hopeful situation is that of Liberia, Frieden said. The number of cases there has decreased quickly, and the country's Ebola treatment center is well run, and has only a handful of patients. Moreover, there are now fewer deaths in places where people previously had been barely able to keep up with the number of dead who needed to be buried, he said.

There have been more than 19,000 cases of Ebola since the outbreak began during the early part of 2014, and about 7,400 people have died of the disease, according to the latest numbers from the CDC.

In order to stop the outbreak, officials need to halt the exponential growth of cases, and trace all of the people who were in contact with sick individuals so that health care workers can follow up with them. Moreover, officials need to strengthen the capacity of health care systems in areas that are now Ebola-free, so that in any cases that develop, ill people can be isolated and cared for promptly, he said.

The Bleu Hole

San Francisco— The ancient Mayan civilization collapsed due to a century-long drought, new research suggests.

Minerals taken from Belize's famous underwater cave, known as the Blue Hole, as well as lagoons nearby, show that an extreme drought occurred between A.D. 800 and A.D. 900, right when the Mayan civilization disintegrated. After the rains returned, the Mayans moved north — but they disappeared again a few centuries later, and that disappearance occurred at the same time as another dry spell, the sediments reveal. [In Photos: Stunning Sinkholes]

Although the findings aren't the first to tie a drought to the Mayan culture's demise, the new results strengthen the case that dry periods were indeed the culprit. That's because the data come from several spots in a region central to the Mayan heartland, said study co-author André Droxler, an Earth scientist at Rice University.

Rise and decline

From A.D. 300 to A.D. 700, the Mayan civilization flourished in the Yucatan peninsula. These ancient Mesoamericans built stunning pyramids, mastered astronomy, and developed both a hieroglyphic writing system and a calendar system, which is famous for allegedly predicting that the world would end in 2012.

But in the centuries after A.D. 700, the civilization's building activities slowed and the culture descended into warfare and anarchy. Historians have speculatively linked that decline with everything from the ancient society's fear of malevolent spirits to deforestation completed to make way for cropland to the loss of favored foods, such as the Tikal deer.

The evidence for a drought has been growing in recent years: Since at least 1995, scientists have been looking more closely at the effects of drought. A 2012 study in the journal Science analyzed a 2,000-year-old stalagmite from a cave in southern Belize and found that sharp decreases in rainfall coincided with periods of decline in the culture. But that data came from just one cave, which meant it was difficult to make predictions for the area as a whole, Droxler said.

The main driver of this drought is thought to have been a shift in the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), a weather system that generally dumps water on tropical regions of the world while drying out the subtropics. During summers, the ITCZ pelts the Yucatan peninsula with rain, but the system travels farther south in the winter. Many scientists have suggested that during the Mayan decline, this monsoon system may have missed the Yucatan peninsula altogether.

Deep history

To look for signs of drought, the team drilled cores from the sediments in the Blue Hole of Lighthouse lagoon, as well one in the Rhomboid reef. The lagoons surrounded on all sides by thick walls of coral reef. During storms or wetter periods, excess water runs off from rivers and streams, overtops the retaining walls, and is deposited in a thin layer at the top of the lagoon. From there, all the sediments from these streams settle to the bottom of the lagoon, piling on top of each other and leaving a chronological record of the historical climate.

"It's like a big bucket. It's a sediment trap," Droxler told Live Science.

Droxler and his colleagues analyzed the chemical composition of the cores, in particular the ratio of titanium to aluminum. When the rains fall, it eats away at the volcanic rocks of the region, which contain titanium. The free titanium then sweeps into streams that reach the ocean. So relatively low ratios of titanium to aluminum correspond to periods with less rainfall, Droxler said.

The team found that during the period between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1000, when the Maya civilization collapsed, there were just one or two tropical cyclones every two decades, as opposed to the usual five or six. After that, the Maya moved north, building at sites such as Chichen Itza, in what is now Mexico.

But the new results also found that between A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1100, during the height of the Little Ice Age, another major drought struck. This period coincides with the fall of Chichen Itza.

The findings strengthen the case that drought helped usher in the long decline of the Mayan culture.

"When you have major droughts, you start to get famines and unrest," Droxler said.

Cotard delusion

Is there anything stranger than an otherwise-sane person wholeheartedly believing he or she is dead? Cotard delusion, otherwise known as walking corpse syndrome, is an extremely rare condition whereby people wake up one day and think they have died, that they no longer exist, or that their flesh is rotting off. It's all in their head, of course, but there's a physical cause nonetheless : The brain region involved in facial recognition has become disconnected from the regions involved in emotion. When the person looks in the mirror, they recognize themselves, but they don't have the usual emotional response. 

Their appearance has lost its association with their sense of self, and this cognitive dissonance results in the sense that they do not exist, or have died.  

Parasitic twin

When a twin embryo begins developing in utero, but the pair does not fully separate and one embryo dominates the other, the weaker twin stops developing and turns into a "parasitic twin" a non-functional, non-conscious collection of extra body parts attached to the healthy remaining twin. Sometimes, the healthy twin is born and raised packing this extra weight. This was the case with Laloo the Hindoo, an Indian man with a parasitic twin attached to his abdomen that had two arms, two legs and a penis but no head; Laloo performed as a sideshow freak in P.T. Barnum's circus at the turn of the 19th century. Today, whenever possible, the parasitic twin is removed. In a recent case in Peru, a three-year-old absorbed his twin into his stomach while the two were gestating in the womb. Doctors successfully removed the boy's parasitic twin Jan. 30. 

Morgellon's disease

There's a new, extremely weird disease in town. Sufferers of "Morgellon's disease," a term coined only one decade ago, feel as if there are things crawling, biting and stinging them below the surface of their skin. Their constant urge to scratch results in insomnia and terrible skin lesions. In January, researchers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued the results of a multi-year investigation of the unexplained condition; they found that patients had no actual disease organisms under their skin, and suggested their sensations were manifestations of "delusional infestation" a false feeling of being infected by parasites.

Maggot infestation

Of all the freaky medical conditions out there, one is most disgusting. A team of researchers at the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & and Tropical Medicine conducted a survey in 2010 to discover what medical conditions humans are most disgusted by. They presented 20 images of things perceived as repulsive from festering wounds to discolored bodily fluids to more than 80,000 individuals from around the world, and had them rate the images from least to most disgusting. 

The image universally ranked as most disgusting is what you see above the mouth of a man who suffers from a Sarcophagid fly larvae infestation. 

This medical condition ranks as most repulsive, said lead researcher Valerie Curtis, because "disgust is designed by evolution to keep us away from parasites that may make us sick, so people pick up on, and are most disgusted by, visual representations of a parasite invasion."  

Mass hysteria

Other names include collective hysteria, group hysteria, or collective obsessional behavior, in sociology and psychology refers to collective delusions of threats to society that spread rapidly through rumors and fear. In medicine more than one person uses the term to describe the spontaneous manifestation of the same or similar hysterical physical symptoms.

A common manifestation of mass hysteria occurs when a group of people believes they are suffering from a similar disease or ailment, sometimes referred to as mass psychogenic illness or epidemic hysteria.

As the name implies, this little-understood psychological condition sets in among a group of people typically a gaggle of young girls who spontaneously manifest the same or similar hysterical symptoms, such as seizures, convulsions or fainting. Sufferers believe they all have the same disease or illness, but in fact they're all in good physical health. A famous historical case resulted in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Dozens of people were accused of (and hanged for) causing several young girls in and around Salem, Mass., to have frequent seizures and convulsions. (The image shows Mary Walcott, 17, convulsing on the courthouse floor during one of the trials.) The girls were posthumously diagnosed with mass hysteria. Accusations of witchcraft no longer fly, but mass hysteria is alive and well. Recently, Thera Sanchez, a high school cheerleader in upstate New York, developed strange physical and vocal tics; this led to a dozen other girls and one boy in her school developing the same Tourette's-like symptoms. Officials initially wondered if the students were being poisoned, but psychiatrists recognized the phenomenon as a modern day case of mass hysteria. 

Mass hysteria manifesting as collective symptoms of disease is sometimes referred to as mass psychogenic illness or epidemic hysteria. Mass hysteria typically begins when an individual becomes ill or hysterical during a period of stress. After this initial individual shows symptoms, others begin to manifest similar symptoms, typically nausea, muscle weakness, fits or headache.

Pica

Sufferers of pica have an undeniable urge to eat non-food, often as a result of stress, mineral deficiency or pregnancy. The disease has many sub-categories, some weirder and more dangerous than others, to describe people who eat chalk, feces, glass, mucus, paint, body parts, hair, urine, wood and more. Pictured above are 1,446 metal items, from nails to salt shaker tops, that were surgically removed from the stomach of a pica patient in Missouri. She died of blood loss during the surgery.  

It is Characterized by an appetite for substances that are largely non-nutritive, such as paper,clay, metal, chalk, soil, glass, or sand. According to DSM-IV criteria, for these actions to be considered pica, they must persist for more than one month at an age where eating such objects is considered developmentally inappropriate, not part of culturally sanctioned practice and sufficiently severe to warrant clinical attention. There are different variations of pica, as it can be from a cultural tradition, acquired taste, or a neurological mechanism such as an iron deficiency or a chemical imbalance. It can lead to intoxication in children, which can result in an impairment in both physical and mental development. In addition, it can also lead to surgical emergencies due to an intestinal obstruction as well as more subtle symptoms such as nutritional deficiencies and parasitosis. Pica has been linked to mental disorders and they often have psychotic comorbidity. Stressors such as maternal deprivation, family issues, parental neglect, pregnancy, poverty, and a disorganized family structure are strongly linked to pica.

Pica is more commonly seen in women and children, where it affects people of all ages in these subgroups. Particularly it is seen in pregnant women, small children, and those with developmental disabilities such as autism. Children eating painted plaster containing lead may suffer brain damage from lead poisoning. There is a similar risk from eating soil near roads that existed before tetraethyl lead in petrol was phased out (in some countries) or before people stopped using contaminated oil (containing toxic PCBs or dioxin) to settle dust. In addition to poisoning, there is also a much greater risk of gastro-intestinal obstruction or tearing in the stomach.^{[unreliable medical source?]} Another risk of eating soil is the ingestion of animal feces and accompanying parasites. Pica can also be found in other animals and is commonly found in dogs. 

Congenital insensitivity to pain

Nobody wish you didn't feel pain? Take it back right now! Pain is a life-saving physical response to danger, and when people are born with a rare genetic mutation that leaves them unable to feel pain, they often die early deaths as a result of treatable injuries that they simply fail to notice. It all starts in infancy, when babies born with pain insensitivity bite off the tips of their tongues, break their bones without making a fuss, and get corneal damage after neglecting to brush foreign objects out of their eyes.

What is CIPA?

Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA) has two characteristic features: the inability to feel pain and temperature, and decreased or absent sweating (anhidrosis). This condition is also known as hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy type IV. The signs and symptoms of CIPA appear early, usually at birth or during infancy, but with careful medical attention, affected individuals can live into adulthood.

An inability to feel pain and temperature often leads to repeated severe injuries. Unintentional self-injury is common in people with CIPA, typically by biting the tongue, lips, or fingers, which may lead to spontaneous amputation of the affected area. In addition, people with CIPA heal slowly from skin and bone injuries. Repeated trauma can lead to chronic bone infections (osteomyelitis) or a condition called Charcot joints, in which the bones and tissue surrounding joints are destroyed.

Normally, sweating helps cool the body temperature. However, in people with CIPA, anhidrosis often causes recurrent, extremely high fevers (hyperpyrexia) and seizures brought on by high temperature (febrile seizures).

In addition to the characteristic features, there are other signs and symptoms of CIPA. Many affected individuals have thick, leathery skin (lichenification) on the palms of their hands or misshapen fingernails or toenails. They can also have patches on their scalp where hair does not grow (hypotrichosis). About half of people with CIPA show signs of hyperactivity or emotional instability, and many affected individuals have intellectual disability. Some people with CIPA have weak muscle tone (hypotonia) when they are young, but muscle strength and tone become more normal as they get older.