"Initially, their faces display sheer horror. But after two steps into the museum, the group of visiting Thai schoolchildren starts to giggle.... Because the spectacle of ten mummified casualties of AIDS soon proves to be too much to bear for every teenage visitor. The collection of dead bodies, including a monk, a housewife, a drug user, a prostitute and two children, is there to show that no one is immune from the disease. Jiraporn wears a trendy hat. Her cheerful round face smiles to us from a photograph. Her body lies stock-still in a tank filled with formalin. The actress died of AIDS at the age of 29."

"Last year a remarkable exhibit came to light. Hidden in the vaults of a London museum was a scrap of paper containing a few strands of hair. The paper was crudely fashioned into an envelope but the words on it immediately caused a stir: 'Hair of His Late Majesty, King George 3rd.' For Professor Martin Warren, it was the clue that would help him finally solve the mystery of King George's illness. His investigation is featured in a BBC documentary, Medical Mysteries."

"As if they were models, rather than deceased human beings, the bodies are presented in ways that show their inner workings in intricate detail. Museum staffers understand that displaying dissected body parts and corpses sounds grotesque, but the exhibit is far from it, judging from the reactions of visitors."

"A long-rumoured secret crypt of Italy's mighty Medici family has been discovered by scientists after a hunt reminiscent of an Indiana Jones movie...Most of the remains were in an advanced state of decomposition, but one of the children had been expertly embalmed, and vestiges of clothing remained on the body."

"The fate of the Russian royal family was plunged into renewed controversy yesterday after scientists cast doubt over British DNA tests on bones recovered from a mass grave...Dr Knight and his team questioned the results, raised "forensic irregularities" and conducted an independent DNA analysis of the preserved finger of the late Grand Duchess Elisabeth - sister of Tsarina Alexandra, one of the 1918 victims."

"Smoky Joe was a corpse with a history longer than a body had a right to expect. For more than three decades, Smoky Joe was stored at a South Richmond funeral home. Newspaper accounts of the 1950s brought renewed attention to the mortuary mascot and led to a long-delayed disposition of the remains. In August 1958, The Times-Dispatch reported that the unidentified, embalmed body had remained at the funeral home for 36 years in a remarkable state of preservation."

"In Waldo Wilcox's boyhood memory, the trio of mummified bodies were an intriguing wonder -- the male covered in beaver skin, a woman and child wrapped in cedar bark. His neighbors -- who in the 1940s leased land near today's spectacular Range Creek archaeological site -- told the 11-year-old Wilcox they were donating the bodies to a college in Phoenix. The mummies' fate is a mystery. There's no record of them at Arizona State University in Tempe, the most likely recipient, or in Utah repositories."

"Twenty-five real people. Real bodies. Real flesh and blood. Plus 200 authentic human specimens vividly dissected into a world of body parts turned inside out through a scientific process called 'plastination' -- tissues preserved in plastic."

"Climbers poking around a high-elevation camp on Mount McKinley discovered a human foot sticking out of the snow. Rangers dug out the frozen corpse of a man who died 35 years ago."

"For more than 50 years, Waldo Wilcox never told the secret of Range Creek. He shooed away the curious and allowed just a handful of scientists to explore his 4,000-acre ranch, deep in the narrow sandstone canyons of eastern Utah. But on Wednesday, the secret was out.... Wilcox once found the mummified remains of a Fremont man, woman and child. The man was wrapped in strips of beaver skin, and the woman and child were encased in cedar bark. He said the bodies were taken to an Arizona museum — he wouldn't say by whom — and he never heard of them again."