Exposed

A 7-member team attempted to summit Mexico's highest mountain, Pico de Orizaba, In 1959, but they were overtaken by an avalanche. Four of the climbers were killed, but only one body was recovered at the time. The bodies of 2 of the missing men have just been found during a recent expedition. Luis Espinoza, who has now been mourning the loss of his fellow climbers for 56 years, commented, "I'll be at peace if they are."

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Chopin's heart

The heart of Frederic Chopin has had a long journey (READ ABOUT IT HERE) since the death of the composer in 1849. At his request it was removed from his body, which was buried at Père Lachaise in Paris, and is now enshrined in a church in his native Poland. After it had been preserved in alcohol (possibly cognac) within a hermetically sealed crystal jar and encased in an urn made of mahogany and oak, it was smuggled into Warsaw by his sister. The organ was examined in 1945, when it was described as "incredibly large." A request by scientists in 2008 to test it and determine the musician's cause of death was denied by the Polish government. But in September, news broke that a group of 13 clergy and scholars clandestinely removed and examined the heart in the middle of a night in April 2014. The relic currently appears as an enlarged white lump submerged in an amber-colored fluid in a crystal jar. The team took hundreds of unreleased photographs, but were not allowed to take tissue samples. Poland's then culture minister Bogdan Zdrojewski was present and declares, "We in Poland often say that Chopin died longing for his homeland. Additional information which could possibly be gained about his death would not be enough of a reason to disturb Chopin's heart." Contradicting that remark is the official announcement by Poland that their native son's heart will be reinspected…but not for another 50 years.

 

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Slaves to fashion

While today's fashionistas continue to risk their health balancing on high heels and slimming their waists with corsets, Victorians risked their lives to costume themselves in the most up-to-date colors. The first synthetic dye, created by William Henry Perkin in 1856, was mauve – and the woman who wore the shoes above would have been considered especially fashion-forward – but the dye was incredibly toxic, made with arsenic, picric acid, and other harmful chemicals. The chemicals were hazards for both the wearer and the maker, such as the mercury used by milliners that led to the proverb "mad as a hatter." A long-term exhibit focusing on the historic dangers of style has just opened at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century was organized by senior curator Elizabeth Semmelhack and fashion professor Alison Matthews David of Ryerson University. The exhibit is structured like a period showroom and Matthews David remarks, "You could just go through this beautiful Parisian shopping arcade and enjoy this spectacle of consumption, but if you read into it you find that the story behind it is not quite as pretty as the artifact."

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Reverse mummification

Forensic odontologist Alejandro Hernández Cárdenas of the Ciudad Juárez Forensic Science Laboratory has made a name for himself by rehydrating the bodies of the victims of crimes that go back yearś. It has become standard practice to inject glycerin into individual digits to reconstitute them for fingerprinting, but Hernández Cárdenas has developed a technique for reconstituting entire corpses. He immerses the bodies of the victims of violence in his Mexican border city that were stored or buried without being identified. His secret formula raises features on the skin including the prints, any tattoos or birthmarks, and lesions, and returns the internal organs almost to their condition at death. So far, his work has resulted in only a handful of identifications and solved crimes, and he tries to keep a low profile to be avoid becoming a target himself. But forensic scientists from around the world have taken note and he has applied for a patent. He began developing his formula in 2002, using ears and fingers from the lab that he placed in glass jars. When he arrived at work one morning, he found that one of the fingers had perfectly rehydrated and thought his co-workers were playing a trick on him. but he learned that his experiments had paid off when they assured him, “We don’t mess with your filthiness.”

 

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Bat broth

As you may be aware, there is an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the West African nation of Guinea. The frightening disease has killed 63 people so far, and is transmitted by bats and by animals that have eaten fruit contaminated by bat feces or saliva. Because the local cuisine includes bats - usually cooked in a peppery soup or smoked over a fire – the government has officially banned selling bats and consuming bat soup, which is also eaten in Asia and the Pacific (IMAGE ABOVE). Even though boiled bat meat may be safe, butchering the animals for the table and eating their smoked meat may still transmit the virus. Remy Lamah, the country’s health minister, said, “We discovered the vector agent of the Ebola virus is the bat. We sent messages everywhere to announce the ban. People must even avoid consumption of rats and monkeys. They are very dangerous animals.”

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Misidentified mummy

A 500-year-old mummy housed in the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection is revealing some more of her secrets. Although no written records about her exist at the museum and she does not even have an accession number, she is believed to have been brought to Germany by a Bavarian princess c. 1898. For many years, however, it was assumed she was a European bog body. But the princess had recently been on an expedition to South America and researchers have now confirmed her origin. The material used to make the rope which tied her braids (IMAGE ABOVE) originated in South America, and her skull formation was typical of the Inca people. Stable isotope analysis of her bones and hair indicates that she had a diet rich in fish, which suggests that she lived near the Peruvian or Northern Chilean coastline. Blunt force trauma to the center of her face shows that she was – like a bog body – ritually killed. At 20, she was older than most sacrificial victims, but DNA analysis reveals yet another detail. "Present-day techniques offer such a wealth of information that we can reconstruct various aspects of past lives, diseases and death," notes study co-author paleopathologist Andreas Nerlich of Munich University. The researchers found that she suffered from a parasitic infection called Chagas disease, which would soon have taken her life if her killers hadn't.

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Melancholy marbles

When 83-year-old Toosje Kupers was moving last year, she found some toys she had kept for decades in a cupboard. The book, tea set, and collection of marbles (IMAGE ABOVE) had belonged to her little playmate on the Merwedeplein in Amsterdam and were left in Toosje's care when the girl's family announced they were leaving for Switzerland. She remembers the concern of her childhood friend when she turned them over: "'I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands. Could you keep them for me for a little while?'" The marbles remain safe – it was the girl and her family who fell into the wrong hands, and she was never able to reclaim them. Her fate is well-known and her name is Anne Frank.

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Vintage venom

Among snake handlers, his name is held in high regard. Amateur Australian herpetologist Kevin Budden (ABOVE RIGHT) specialized in collecting venomous snakes from the wild and, at the age of 20, finally found a live taipan (Oxyuranus scutellatus) in north Queensland and subdued it with his foot. Unable to bag the enraged and deadly snake, he held its grip on it until he reached a local snake-catcher. But by then his hand was cramped and sweaty and even with help bagging the snake, his grip faltered and it bit him on the hand. He was rushed to the hospital, but died the next day. This was 1950 and there was no antivenom for the taipan, which was why Budden wanted so badly to catch one. Even on his deathbed, he insisted that the snake should not be harmed, so it was taken to Melbourne and milked for its venom. Fast-forward 58 years when University of Queensland scientist Bryan Fry was at the University of Melbourne helping to inventory the uncataloged part of the collection of Straun Sutherland, founder of the Australian Venom Research Unit who died in 2002. Opening some of the dusty boxes, he discovered vial upon vial of vintage venom – Including that of the taipan which had killed Budden. “It was like opening a time capsule. It gave me goosebumps. These were very personal samples to us. To be working with the milkings from that exact snake…these weren’t just letters on the side of the tube. They had historical and emotional value.” And, Budden would be pleased to know, they still have scientific value. Even though it had been stored at room temperature for decades, the venom is stable and retains its toxicity, so it will continue to be studied.

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The Pearl of Allah

The largest pearl in the world is not a gemstone, but a clam pearl. Because it grew attached to the shell of the giant clam, the Pearl of Lao Tzu, previously known as the Pearl of Allah (REPRODUCTION ABOVE), is called a blister pearl and it weighs in at an incredible 14.1 lbs (6.4 kg). It is as big as a man's head, specifically – in the eyes of a Muslim tribal chief in the Philippines, where it supposedly originated – the turbaned head of the Prophet Mohammed, hence its name. The [first] story promoted by American Wilburn Cobb, who came into possession of the giant pearl in 1939, is what intrigued me when I read about it yesterday. I was talking with someone* about the longevity of certain animals, and I mentioned clams, so we consulted this article and learned the legend. Supposedly, a Filipino diver had come across the clam off the island of Palawan. He had been diving for conchs and accidentally or deliberately reached into the giant shell, which slammed shut on his arm with the force of a bear trap. It never released him and he drowned. It took it his fellow divers 4 days to find and recover his body. When they brought it up, they also retrieved the clam that contained the Pearl of Allah, the history and ownership of which is in dispute.

*Thanks Lindsay!

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Plague-ridden

The prisons are overcrowded and unsanitary. Overrun with vermin, it is the fleas on the rats which spread the disease to the convicts. When they are released, or when family members leave after their visits, they spread the plague into the community. The public health system itself is in poor condition, so although the infection can be treated to lower the mortality rate, hundreds have died. Where are we? In Europe in the Middle Ages? No. This is occurring in modern Madagascar.

 

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Digitized diseases

Diseases which we thought we had conquered are rearing their ugly heads. This includes polio, which is currently spreading in Syria. Martha Ann Lillard of Oklahoma offers herself up as a living reminder that an outbreak of polio anywhere in the world is a danger everywhere. Paralyzed at the age of 5 in 1953, she has survived ever since in an iron lung. If that's not scary enough, there is now an online resource that shows what happens when diseases are left unchecked. The 1,600 historical specimens of formerly incurable or untreatable diseases – including syphilis, rickets, and leprosy – have been digitized by the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The Digitized Diseases database is intended for archaeologists, interested laypersons, and medical clinicians who do not see such advanced cases in their practices. Andrew Wilson of the University of Bradford, who served as lead researcher on the project, notes, "If the vivid evidence of these bones flags up the importance of taking these conditions very seriously and tackling them early, so much the better."

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Justifiable homicide

Police called in special forces to contend with a 59-year-old man brandishing a shotgun for unknown reasons in an apartment building in the east of the capital. The other occupants in the apartment block were evacuated for their own safety. The unidentified man refused to respond to police attempts to communicate with him. They lobbed teargas into the windows, but when that failed to stop him 15 to 20 officers entered the building. They were fired upon and 2 of them were injured, one in the face and the other in the hand. At that point, lethal force was used to bring an end to the incident. "All available members of the police force were deployed, and they tried to subdue him, but it was not successful. The man began to shoot out the window of the apartment and it was decided to take action," explained Metropolitan Police Commissioner Stefan Eiriksson. Why did this make international headlines? Because, although one quarter of the population of 322,000 are gun owners, this is the first time someone has been killed in an armed police operation in Iceland.

 

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Morbid miniatures

Beginning in the late 18th c., potteries in the Staffordshire region of England began to create commemorative figurines. The subject of these miniatures ranged from art to sports to politics. But they soon began to illustrate what could be read about in broadsides: the lurid news of the day. It began with the depiction of French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat being stabbed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday in 1793 and peaked with scenes of the infamous Red Barn Murder in 1827. With the Industrial Revolution, the miniatures could be afforded not just by the well-to-do but by the middle class. Staffordshire potteries began churning out the morbid along with the mundane. Author Myrna Schkolne documents them in a new book and describes her favorite (IMAGE ABOVE):

"Well, my favorite is a figure showing a tiger or tigress mauling a woman and her baby. That sounds so wrong. The tigress is holding the baby in her mouth and the woman beneath her paws. The figure is titled 'Menagerie.' A Staffordshire menagerie is a well-known genre, but this was clearly not a normal menagerie object. The thing drove me nuts. I couldn’t work out the whys and the wherefores. Then one night at about 1:00 a.m., I came across an old broadside that led me to the Colindale newspaper archive in the U.K. A small paragraph in the Northumberland Herald for February of 1834 describes how Wombwell’s Menagerie had stopped in a town overnight, and during the night, a tigress and a lion had escaped, and they had killed a woman with a child in her arms. Usually, any sort of menagerie mishap is very well publicized, but I think in this case the owner of the menagerie, George Wombwell, was very quick to open his wallet because if word got about, people wouldn’t have wanted his menagerie in town. I felt that my research gave the piece back its history: This figure was made because this terrible thing happened in February 1834. That’s fascinating to me, being able to learn about things we have forgotten."

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Dog/leg

In a scene right out The Lovely Bones, a pet dog (IMAGE ABOVE) dragged home a human leg. When "Liberty" returned to the home of Bill Flowers on the Nisqually Indian Reservation in western Washington last week, she was standing over a grayish limb, complete from nearly the hip to its undamaged toes. Afraid to get involved, Flowers buried the leg in his backyard, explaining, "I'm 93 years old. I didn't want to have to go to the pen for something I didn't do." It was his daughter Cheryl who convinced him to call the police 4 days later (VIDEO HERE). The Thurston County sheriff's office dug up the leg, then initiated a search with Liberty who wore a tracking collar, 5 other search dogs, and 30 volunteers. They turned up a skull, a pelvis, and a rib cage in the nearby woods. The remains are being examined by a pathologist and the investigation is ongoing.

 

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Franklin's goal finally met

British Royal Navy officer Sir John Franklin and the 128 men of his expedition lost their lives in 1847 attempting to find a way through the Canadian Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The elusive Northwest Passage remained unbreached – except by icebreakers, tugs, and small cargo ships – until just now. The Danish-owned commercial bulk carrier Nordic Orion (IMAGE ABOVE) passed through from Vancouver, British Columbia, where it was loaded up with coal on September 6th, to Baffin Bay in the North Atlantic, which it reached early last week. The 225m 75,000-ton vessel was strengthened for the voyage and bound for Finland, where the metallurgical coal will likely be used to make steel. By bypassing the usual route through the Panama Canal, the ship was able to carry about 25% more coal and trim about 1,000 nautical miles from its journey. But as Wendy Stueck reports in The Globe and Mail, "While shipping agents in Vancouver and around the world are mulling potential implications for shipping commodities, others have voiced concerns about the lack of environmental and safety infrastructure in Canada’s North." Rather than a historic milestone, the accomplishment represents the potential for another environmental disaster.

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Honest alpinist

A young Frenchman made a discovery while climbing the Bosson glacier on the approach to the summit of Mont Blanc in the Alps. It was a tin the size of the shoebox with indications that the contents had come from India. The mountaineer was aware that wreckage sometimes surfaced from 2 Air India aircraft that had crashed years ago – one a propeller plane that crashed in 1950 resulting in the deaths of 48 passengers and crew and the other a Boeing 707 that went down in 1966 killing all 11 crew and 106 passengers. The Indian government claimed a bag of diplomatic mail which surfaced near the wreckage of the second accident and was found by 2 climbers in 2012 (IMAGE ABOVE). This recently discovered box is believed to have been on the same plane, and the French authorities have contacted their Indian counterparts to see if the owner of the contents can be found. "This was an honest young man who very quickly realised that they belonged to someone who died on the glacier," says local gendarmerie chief Sylvain Merly of the climber who immediately turned in his discovery. If the rightful owner cannot be located, the tin will be his along with the treasure trove it contains: roughly 100 precious gems including emeralds, rubies, and sapphires with an estimated value of €246,000 (£207,000, $332,000)!

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Voices

 

Like many Americans, I am deeply troubled by the violence of our culture, which only seems to increase and too often manifests itself in mass killings by people with mental health issues. American psychological anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann of Stanford University is careful to point out that the vast majority of schizophrenics never commit a violent act, but that they are significantly more likely to do so than the broader population, especially when they have auditory hallucinations. To them, the voices are real and spoken by an external, commanding authority. Luhrmann has been working with colleagues at the Schizophrenia Research Foundation in Chennai, India, to compare the voice-hearing experiences of Indians and Americans and has found that they are culturally specific. While schizophrenics in the U.S. hear voices that instruct them to do bodily harm to themselves or others, the patients in Chennai were ordered to do domestic chores like cooking and cleaning. While the schizophrenics of India sometimes describe the voices speaking in vulgar or sexual terms, one of the most disgusting commands was to drink out of the toilet. The observation that the hallucinations are shaped by local culture lends support to the recent movement that the voices can be altered through therapy to make them less frequent, less intense, and less disturbing. Luhrmann observes, "We Americans live in a society in which, when people feel threatened, they think about guns. The same cultural patterns that make it difficult to get gun violence under control may also be responsible for making these terrible auditory commands that much harsher."

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Severed sensation

Evidence of severed human heads living on for a few moments is anecdotal, because of course it would be highly unethical to test such a thing. The most recent story is related by a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War who was in an automobile accident with his friend in 1989. They were riding in a taxi when it collided with a truck, pinning him to his seat and decapitating his companion:

"My friend's head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression . . . and he was dead."

Meanwhile, back at the science lab, a team of British and Italian researchers just published a study proving that the detached arms of octopuses retain the ability to recoil from unpleasant stimuli. The image above shows a tentacle withdrawing from a petri dish full of acid. The experiment involved euthanizing the creatures and severing their limbs. Although the nervous systems of octopi are very different from ours, their proven intelligence has prompted the European Union to ban – as unethical – any future experiments involving their pain or distress.

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Sickle

The sickle (EXAMPLE ABOVE) is a hand-held agricultural tool with a curved blade used as long ago as 18,000 B.C. to harvest grain or to cut hay to feed livestock. It was used for an entirely different purpose on Sunday, June 30th, 2013, at a soccer match in Brazil. Fans gathered at the local stadium in Centro do Meio, Maranhao, to watch an amateur match. Instead, what they saw – and what some participated in – was a horrific unfolding of events. A 20-year-old referee met with some resistance when he tried to expel a 31-year-old player from the game. After the player threw him to the ground, the referee pulled a knife, stabbed him in the chest, and killed him. Players and spectators, some of them said to be friends and family members of the victim, rushed the field in revenge. One of them tied up the arms and legs of the referee while another hit him over the head and broke a bottle on his face. Another man, still at large, picked up the bloody knife the referee had just used to kill the player and stabbed him in the neck with it. Then the brother of the man with the bottle, who is also still being sought by police, used a sickle to cut off the referee's arms, legs, and head. After quartering and decapitating him, the frenzied mob placed his head on a pike in the middle of the playing field. Photos of the mayhem and a video of its aftermath can be seen here (CAUTION). Security expert and retired police officer Paulo Storani said, "While it's true we are used to soccer violence in Brazil, this is completely off the charts of what we usually see."

 

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