Saturday, August 22, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Bogosphere: The Strangest Things Pulled Out of Peat Bogs
A few thousand years ago, someone living in what is now Ireland made some butter, stuck it into an oak barrel, wandered out into a bog about 25 miles west of Dublin, and buried it.
Somehow, that someone lost track of it, which two lucky archaeologists discovered when they dug up the stashed loot earlier this year in the Gilltown bog, between the Irish towns of Timahoe and Staplestown.
But that wasn’t the first keg of butter that’s been preserved by the strange chemistry of the bog. Or the 10th. More than 270 kegs of bog butter have been retrieved from the wetlands, along with dozens of ancient bodies, swords, and ornaments. Here, we run down some of the strangest things that scientists and citizens have pulled from the peat.
All kinds of bodies have been found with their skin and organs intact. The objects are preserved by the remarkable properties of Sphagnum mosses, which come with preservatives built into their cell walls. After they die, they decay very slowly. and anything that falls into the Sphagnum peat bogs decays more slowly, too.
Murder weapons are a common find. Archaeologists believe the bogs were sites for ritual sacrifices, because many of the bodies appear to have been tortured or “overkilled.” In the picture (above) of a find named Yde girl, you can see the cord that was used to strangle her. Tollund Man suffered a similar fate: A noose was found around his neck.
Murder wasn’t all that happened out on the bogs. Multiple trepanated skulls, that is to say, skulls with holes drilled in them, have been found. Based on the use of the procedure in medieval times, one hypothesis is that the “operation may have been performed to remove a blood clot or a less-tangible thing like a spirit” from an individual. Even now, there’s still a small number of people who think drilling holes in their skulls is therapeutic.
While we don’t know much about the people who wandered these bogs thousands of years ago, analytical chemistry has helped identify substances that make them seem startlingly modern. One corpse’s hair appears to have been coated with primitive hair gel, made from “vegetable oil mixed with resin from pine trees found in Spain and southwest France.” The man lived around 300 B.C.
Beyond the bodies, which were the subject of a traveling international exhibit, The Mysterious Bog People, functional artifacts are often found, too. These swords from what are now Sweden and Denmark were discovered in the late 1890s.
This wheel was discovered in the Netherlands along with another just like it. It’s about 2½ feet in diameter and carved from a single piece of oak. It’s been dated to 2700 B.C., which makes it one of the oldest wheels found in Europe. (But let’s not get bogged down in reinventing the wheel.)
A construction crew working on a highway in 1955 pulled up this dugout canoe from a Dutch bog. It’s almost 9 feet long and was radiocarbon-dated to 8500 B.C.
Images: 1. flickr/ronlayters 2. Drenth Museum, Netherlands 3. Drenth Museum 4. Anthropologisk Laboratorium of Denmark 5. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 6. Drenth Museum 7. Drenth Museum
See Also:
- Gallery: The Making of a Prehistoric Brew
- No @#&!, Sherlock: Prehistoric Cave Bears Were Ferocious and Other Obvious Science
- Scientists Find Contents of Prehistoric Messenger Bag
- The First Aid: Iceman May Have Dressed His Own Wounds
- Scientists Discover 3000-Pound Gigantoraptor Dinosaur in Mongolia
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
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Thursday, August 20, 2009
Ask Strangers for Medical Advice
Some people just can’t get rid of their acne, or chronic pain, or psoriasis, no matter what treatment their doctor recommends. Now, just like looking for a hotel recommendation, they can turn to strangers with the same ailments for advice at an online community called CureTogether.
The website is much like Yelp, but its members review remedies, instead of restaurants and barber shops. It allows anyone who is facing a tough medical decision to draw upon the experience of crowds.
“People with acne report treatments they have tried and rank how well they worked,” said Alexandra Carmichael, co-founder of the website. “Everyone else with acne can then see the community stats.”
The same goes for 350 other conditions including migraines, insomnia, irritable bowel, and acid reflux.
Whole Foods and other retailers peddle countless alternative medicine products, but there is very little data about whether those substances work, and even less incentive for a big drug companies to find out. This may be part of what is driving a trend toward DIY health tracking.
Though it’s not a substitute for professional medical care, members of the CureTogether community can share their experiences with every treatment they’ve tried and help others decide what to buy, how to change their behavior, or what to ask their doctor. Every bit of that user data is also available to researchers, so it could potentially cut the cost of evidence-based medicine research, studies that aim to evaluate the effectiveness of medical treatments.
To keep shameless drugmakers or herbmongers from tainting their information like disgruntled diners and restaurant owners try to do on Yelp at times, CureTogether has several security measures in place, including some active analysis of their log files.
Even if some bad apples make their way into the community, it may still be a better source of information than some peer-reviewed literature, since top scientists have been caught fabricating data about medications and Elsevier has published entire fake journals dedicated to bolstering the reputation of Merck drugs.
Image: Statistics showing a variety of acne treatments and how effective they are./CureTogether
See Also:
- Human Genetics is Now a Viable Hobby — 23andMe Cuts its Price to …
- Enter Navigenics, Where Personal Genomics Gets More Medical
- 23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics
- Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing
- Crowdsourcing the Flu Vaccine
- Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early
Follow us on Twitter @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
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Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Make Money from Tweets!
Now you can make money from every tweet!
http://revtwt.com/index.php?id=35648
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Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Artificial Tongue Is Sweeter Than Real Thing
Sunday, August 16, 2009
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