Mummified woman found in her apartment 13 years after her death (newsfromrussia.com)

"A University of Louisville research team recently helped the Louisville Science Center learn more about an old friend — a 2,600-year-old friend. Actually, the friend, a mummy called Then-Hotep, is more like a family member, having been one of the most popular attractions at the science center and its forerunner, the Natural History Museum, since the early part of the last century. But throughout all of those years, it kept one big secret: Nobody knew its gender. Until now. Under the leadership of professor Aly Farag, director of the Computer Vision and Imaging Process lab at J.B. Speed School of Engineering, the UofL team applied technological and forensic expertise to verify that Then-Hotep is a female. The human skull holds many clues to gender, so the team focused on making a faithful reproduction of the mummy’s head, Farag said. Here’s how the team did it...." 

"When a coroner daydreams, it isn’t pretty. Mike Murphy has a regular morning routine: He spends an hour eating a breakfast sandwich and reading the paper in his pajamas before he changes into one of his sharp suits, drives to work in his black beast of a county car, parks in his special spot, and walks through a back door of a low building and into the lively world of Vegas’ dead. When the coroner catches a few minutes, he’ll go eat an omelette at a nearby cafe (he always brings a muffin back for his secretary), or dust the photographs on his desk, most of which feature the bald man and his blushing bride. And when he’s really alone with his thoughts, when he’s snapping on the 10,000th pair of latex gloves, or on hold waiting for someone important to pick up, the coroner might spend a few seconds thinking about bodies rotting in the Clark County desert. Dozens of them, laid out bare, or locked in cars, or buried in refrigerators 6 feet underground, slowly decomposing or bleaching into bone. When a coroner daydreams, it’s of body farms...." 

"A tomb to house the remains of a woman found after being preserved in ice for 2,500 years will be built in Siberia's Altai Republic, the director of a local museum said on Thursday. The well-preserved remains of the woman dubbed the Altai Princess were discovered in the region by a team led by a Novosibirsk archeologist in 1993 near the Mongolian border, and have been studied at the Archaeology and Ethnography Institute in Novosibirsk. Residents of Altai, where shamanism is still widespread, had repeatedly called for the body's return to its homeland, and blamed the removal for earth tremors and other natural disasters. However, Novosibirsk scientists had been reluctant to return the body, saying local museums did not have the necessary facilities to preserve it. "A decision has been taken to build a sloping building for the mummy, resembling a burial mound. This will be an extension to the main building of the national museum" in Gorno-Altaysk, the museum director said. The body will now be housed in a state-of-the-art glass temperature-controlled case. Construction work should be finished by the end of this year...."

"Yards and yards of clear plastic sheeting line the cellar floor, dwarfing the corpse: headless, frail, supine. The young bony arms — covered in fine black powder from centuries of immobility in the frozen tundra — are crossed at rest, reminiscent of a ceremonial burial. Camera flashes illuminate the scene. Several dozen scientists stand around the body, murmuring in Russian and English about the find of the day. How long do you think it was buried? Do you think it’s male or female? How did they get it back to camp? And the pervasive thought: I don’t think we should touch it. He could have died of smallpox. Smallpox was a vicious disease before its eradication in the 1970s, but the virus is hardy and can survive long-term storage. One such storage unit is the tundra of the high northern latitudes that preserves an unknown number of bodies that could have died from smallpox. Global warming is now rapidly thawing this freezer, increasing the chance that someone could come into contact with a smallpox-infested body, thereby reintroducing the disease. Smallpox rivals malaria as the most deadly infectious disease ever to affect humans. Throughout history, people looked for ways to combat the disease, priming their immune systems with remedies such as sniffing ground-up scabs or smearing pus into open wounds. The first true vaccine — developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner — was for smallpox...."

More on Dakota

"Two years after police in Concord confiscated an 18-inch mummified baby boy from a man’s apartment, the city was expected to bury it Tuesday, no closer to resolving who he was. A Merrimack County Probate Court judge ordered the remains of "Baby John" buried after DNA tests failed to prove the boy was related to Charles Peavey. Peavey’s family had the mummy for 80 to 90 years when the Concord police learned about it in April 2006. Peavey, like his relatives before him, considered the mummy a family heirloom and believed it was possibly the stillborn son of a great-great-uncle. DNA samples taken from the mummy, however, were too degraded to yield answers. In January, the state attorney general’s office asked the probate court to order the remains buried...."

From September 2007:Judge order burial of Concord's baby mummy (concordmonitor.com)

"They'll be no more holidays or show-and-tells for "Baby John," the mummified baby displayed on Charles Peavey's bureau until the police confiscated it last year. A probate court judge yesterday said state officials can bury the infant's decades-old remains because Peavey hasn't proven his claim that he and the mummy are kin. Peavey, 42, of Concord, has 30 days to appeal that decision, but he said yesterday he won't. "I'm just washing my hands of it," said Peavey, who said he skipped the court hearing because he can't afford the DNA tests needed to prove kinship. "I'm disappointed it came to this." Lack of DNA wasn't the only concern raised by attorney Richard Head of the state attorney general's office. Equally troubling, Head told Judge Richard Hampe, is Peavey's MySpace page, a campy collection of haunted houses, skeletons and references to Baby John. The online site opens with The Addams Family's," familiar theme song: "They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky . . . " Next is The Munster's theme song. The page also includes sayings like, "Children shouldn't play with dead things." The website, Head told the judge, raises "questions about whether the remains are being treated with the appropriate respect." Hampe looked at printed-out images from the site but limited his comments to DNA. He said without proof of kinship, state law requires that he insure that the infant's remains were released to a funeral director for burial. And so apparently ends the long and unlikely tale that began in April 200..."

"An Egyptian mummy kept on display in a provincial museum for nearly 80 years has been identified as a son of the powerful pharaoh Ramesses II. The 3,000-year-old relic was thought to have been a female temple dancer, but a hospital CT scan showed features so reminiscent of the Egyptian royal family that experts are 90 per cent sure it is one of the 110 children Ramesses is thought to have fathered. Tests showed that the mummy had a pronounced over-bite and misaligned eyes, akin to members of the 19th Dynasty, and his facial measurements were found to be almost identical to those of Ramesses himself. Experts believe that the mummified man died in his thirties between 1295 and 1186 BC of a wasting disease, likely to be cancer. Chemical analysis also showed that the body had been embalmed using expensive materials, including pistachio resin and thyme, the preserve of priests and royalty. The story of the royal mummy was uncovered by a team from York University who were filmed carrying out the tests for History Channel series Mummy Forensics....."

"Egyptian police confiscated four ancient mummies on Wednesday and arrested three antiquities smugglers who had stolen them from an ancient graveyard, a security official said. Wrapped in layers of linen and decorated with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the mummies were found in the southern province of Minya, 135 miles south of Cairo, the official said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press. The three smugglers also were found with 10 small ancient statues. They confessed that they had planned to sell the objects to antiquities brokers, the official said. The mummies are of a child and three men, but no further details were available, the official said. Archeologists were summoned to check the mummies, he added. Egypt has drastically stepped up efforts in recent years to stop the trafficking of its antiquities. It has warned foreign museums that it will not help them mount exhibitions on ancient Egypt unless they return smuggled artifacts...."

"Three times in less than a year, right feet inside running shoes have been found near separate islands in the Strait of Georgia. Police don't know if there are any links between them. Speculation in the region is rife, including that the feet were from slaying victims or they were the remains from drownings. Police haven't reached any conclusions. "It is very unusual," Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Annie Linteau said Tuesday. Linteau said two of the feet were size 12, but the size of the third was not released. The first right foot was found by beachcombers on Jedidiah Island in August. A few days later, a foot was found inside a man's Reebok sneaker on Gabriola Island. The third was found on the east side of Valdez Island on Feb 8. The shoe brand was announced only for the second foot.... She said the coroner's office was doing DNA testing. British Columbia's corner's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a former professor of oceanography at the University of Washington who studies floating objects, said the feet could have drifted as far as 1,000 miles. He speculated the feet floated away in the buoyant shoes after breaking from decomposing bodies, possibly of people who drowned in boating accidents. Others said they could be from four men whose bodies weren't recovered after their small plane crashed in the area about a year ago...."

"The body of St Padre Pio, one of Italy's most popular saints, was exhumed last night to be prepared for public veneration next month marking the 40th anniversary of his death and the 90th anniversary of the first appearance of stigmata on his hands and feet. Capuchin friars at the sanctuary at San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy, where Padre Pio's tomb is visited by seven million pilgrims annually, said that "parts of the body" had been found to be "intact". Archbishop D'Ambrosio said the body was in "surprisingly good condition. As soon as we got inside the tomb we could clearly make out the beard. The top part of the skull is partly skeletal but the chin is perfect and the rest of the body is well preserved. The knees, hands, mittens and nails are clearly visible.........If Padre Pio allows me, I might say he looks as though he just had a manicure''. The body would be placed in a glass covered coffin for veneration on 24 April for a period of "several months". The friars denied that the remains would be transferred from the sanctuary crypt to a new spacious and ultra modern church nearby at San Giovanni Rotondo designed by the world renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano. The exhumation - the first time the tomb had been opened since Padre Pio's death in 1968 - was approved by the Vatican despite opposition from some of the saint's most ardent followers. Padre Pio's relatives had threatened to take the local archbishop to court if the corpse was exhumed, and a group of devotees had also threatened legal action...."