Beamlines To Reveal Secrets of the Mummies 64
Hugh Pickens writes "A British X-ray with a light ten billion times brighter than the sun is to be used to reveal the secrets of statues, mummies, sarcophagi and other ancient artifacts to analyze their composition and how they were made. Three Egyptian bronze figurines from the British Museum will be among the first treasures to be investigated by the Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing beamline, or Jeep, using intense radiation known as synchrotron light which allows scientists to see through solid objects and to show structural details that cannot be seen by standard X-rays. 'It might give us the chance to look at the contents. The Egyptians used to stash things inside their statues. We also get very fragile inner sarcophagi or mummy wrappings,' says Jen Hiller, a scientist working on the beamline. In Grenoble a team has used synchrotron radiation to discover the first known fossilized brain, of a fish-like creature; details are to be published this month. In California it is being used to decipher the Archimedes palimpsest — a text by the Greek mathematician that was overwritten in medieval times."
Re:Mummy question (Score:5, Informative)
Chemical evidence of tobacco has been found in ancient Egyptian mummies, although tobacco was supposed to be unknown in the Old World prior to Columbus. First, fragments of tobacco were found deep in the abdominal cavity of the 3200-year-old mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II while it was being studied in a European museum. Some skeptics immediately concluded that this had to be due to modern contamination in the museum. This American plant could not possibly have been known in Egypt, they insisted. In 1992 physical scientists in Germany used sophisticated laboratory instrumentation to test nine other Egyptian mummies. They found chemical residues of tobacco, coca (another American plant, the source of cocaine), and the Asian native hashish (the source of marijuana) in the hair, soft tissues, skin, and bones of eight of the mummies. These traces included cotinine, a chemical whose presence means that the tobacco had been consumed and metabolized while the deceased person was alive. (The ninth mummy contained coca and hashish residues but not tobacco.) Dates of the corpses according to historical records from Egypt ranged from 1070 BC to AD 395, indicating that these drugs were continuously available to some Egyptians for no less than 1,450 years. Investigators have since found evidence of the drugs in additional mummies from Egypt.
S. Balabanovea, F. Parsche, and W. Pirsig, "First identification of drugs in Egyptian mummies," Naturwissenschaften 79 (1992): 358.
A. G. Nerlich, F. Parsche, I. Wiest, P. Schramel, and U. LÃhrs, "Extensive pulmonary hemorrhage in an Egyptian mummy," Virchows Archiv 427/4 (1995): 423â"29; Franz Parsche and Andreas Nerlich, "Presence of drugs in different tissues of an Egyptian mummy," Fresenius' Journal of Analytical Chemistry 352 (1995): 380â"84.
Re:Apparent brightness I presume? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm certain they mean that the intensity of the beam is 10^10 larger than the intensity of solar radiation at Earth. (I assume they're referring to energy flux and not photon flux. The synchrotron I worked at produced roughly 10^19 photons/m^2/s; the photon flux at Earth from the sun is roughly 10^21. Synchrotron beams, however, consist of much higher-energy photons.)
While synchrotrons are certainly capable of producing very high-energy beams, if they're referring to intensity, it's sort of cheating -- you can use optics to compress the beam. (For example, compressing a 1 cm square beam to a 10 um square beam.)
Re:Apparent brightness I presume? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mummy question (Score:5, Informative)
While the chemical traces are intriguing... a complete and utter lack of corroborating evidence (I.E. remains of plants in the tombs, records of their growth, examples in tomb or temple paintings, surviving examples, etc. etc.) renders them suspect.
Hmm... a quick google search leads me to the page [byu.edu] you cut and pasted the above from - a page from an organization with a vested interest in finding evidence of cross pollination from the New World to the Old. I can find no other mentions of the first paper. The second paper, I can find references to - mostly defenses against debunkers, and curiously the defense consists mostly of "the chances of error are infinitesimal, and since the chances of error are so small we can assume that there are no errors".
Re:Apparent brightness I presume? (Score:1, Informative)
By brightness, they mean the number of photons in an area and how collimated the photons are. Brightness in this usage has units of (# of photons per unit time per unit area per unit solid angle per energy bandwidth).
As an analogy, an optical laser has a small beam that is highly collimated, and so is much brighter than a light bulb (which emits in all directions) even if the total number of photons emitted and total power is smaller. A laser also emits a very narrow band of wavelengths (energy), which improves its brightness.
A synchrotron x-ray source is bright much the same way a laser is: the x-rays come out very highly collimated (often more collimated than typical optical lasers) and so can put a very large number of x-rays into a small spot. Most synchrotron x-ray sources give a fairly broad energy spectrum, but selecting a narrow bandwidth is common, and still results in extremely bright beams. Synchrotron x-rays are usually pulsed (at kHz frequencies), but quoted brightnesses are usually integrated over a second.
A synchrotron is there when you need 10^10 12keV (0.1 nm wavelength) x-rays per sec in a 10x10 micron spot.