Science Tuesday - Mummies, Dolphins, Polar Bears, and Yoga

[brdgt]

Researchers at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology preparing the frozen mummy of a 15-year-old girl, called La Doncella, “the maiden,” for exhibition.

In Argentina, a Museum Unveils a Long-Frozen Maiden
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, September 11, 2007

SALTA, Argentina — The maiden, the boy, the girl of lightning: they were three Inca children, entombed on a bleak and frigid mountaintop 500 years ago as a religious sacrifice.

Unearthed in 1999 from the 22,000-foot summit of Mount Llullaillaco, a volcano 300 miles west of here near the Chilean border, their frozen bodies were among the best preserved mummies ever found, with internal organs intact, blood still present in the heart and lungs, and skin and facial features mostly unscathed. No special effort had been made to preserve them. The cold and the dry, thin air did all the work. They froze to death as they slept, and 500 years later still looked like sleeping children, not mummies.

In the eight years since their discovery, the mummies, known here simply as Los Niños or “the children,” have been photographed, X-rayed, CT scanned and biopsied for DNA. The cloth, pottery and figurines buried with them have been meticulously thawed and preserved. But the bodies themselves were kept in freezers and never shown to the public — until last week, when La Doncella, the maiden, a 15-year-old girl, was exhibited for the first time, at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology, which was created in Salta expressly to display them.

The new and the old are at home in Salta. The museum faces a historic plaza where a mirrored bank reflects a century-old basilica with a sign warning churchgoers not to use the holy water for witchcraft. Now a city of 500,000 and the provincial capital, Salta was part of the Inca empire until the 1500s, when it was invaded by the Spanish conquistadors.

Although the mummies captured headlines when they were found, officials here decided to open the exhibit quietly, without any of the fanfare or celebration that might have been expected.

“These are dead people, Indian people,” said Gabriel E. Miremont, 39, the museum’s designer and director. “It’s not a situation for a party.”

The two other mummies have not yet been shown, but will be put on display within the next six months or so.

The children were sacrificed as part of a religious ritual, known as capacocha. They walked hundreds of miles to and from ceremonies in Cuzco and were then taken to the summit of Llullaillaco (yoo-yeye-YAH-co), given chicha (maize beer), and, once they were asleep, placed in underground niches, where they froze to death. Only beautiful, healthy, physically perfect children were sacrificed, and it was an honor to be chosen. According to Inca beliefs, the children did not die, but joined their ancestors and watched over their villages from the mountaintops like angels.

Discussing why it took eight years to prepare the exhibit, Dr. Miremont smiled and said, “This is South America,” but then went on to explain that there was little precedent for dealing with mummies as well preserved as these, and that it took an enormous amount of research to figure out how to show them yet still make sure they did not deteriorate.

The solution turned out to be a case within a case — an acrylic cylinder inside a box made of triple-paned glass. A computerized climate control system replicates mountaintop conditions inside the case — low oxygen, humidity and pressure, and a temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit. In part because Salta is in an earthquake zone, the museum has three backup generators and freezers, in case of power failures or equipment breakdowns, and the provincial governor’s airplane will fly the mummies out in an emergency, Dr. Miremont said.

Asked where they would be taken, he replied, “Anywhere we can plug them in.”

The room holding La Doncella is dimly lighted, and the case itself is dark; visitors must turn on a light to see her.

“This was important for us,” Dr. Miremont said. “If you don’t want to see a dead body, don’t press the button. It’s your decision. You can still see the other parts of the exhibit.”

He designed the lighting partly in hope of avoiding further offense to people who find it disturbing that the children, part of a religious ritual, were taken from the mountaintop shrine.

Whatever the intention, the effect is stunning. Late in August, before the exhibit opened, Dr. Miremont showed visitors La Doncella. At a touch of the button, she seemed to materialize from the darkness, sitting cross-legged in her brown dress and striped sandals, bits of coca leaf still clinging to her upper lip, her long hair woven into many fine braids, a crease in one cheek where it leaned against her shawl as she slept.

The bodies seemed so much like sleeping children that working with them felt “almost more like a kidnapping than archaeological work,” Dr. Miremont said.

One of the children, a 6-year-old girl, had been struck by lightning sometime after she died, resulting in burns on her face, upper body and clothing. She and the boy, who was 7, had slightly elongated skulls, created deliberately by head wrappings — a sign of high social status, possibly even royalty.

Scientists worked with the bodies in a special laboratory where the temperature of the entire lab could be dropped to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and the mummies were never exposed to higher temperatures for more than 20 minutes at a time, to preventing thawing.

DNA tests revealed that the children were unrelated, and CT scans showed that they were well nourished and had no broken bones or other injuries. La Doncella apparently had sinusitis, as well as a lung condition called bronchiolitis obliterans, possibly the result of an infection.

“There are two sides,” Dr. Miremont said. “The scientific — we can read the past from the mummies and the objects. The other side says these people came from a culture still alive, and a holy place on the mountain.”

Some regard the exhibit as they would a church, Dr. Miremont said.

“To me, it’s a museum, not a holy place,” he said. “The holy place is on top of the mountain.”

The mountains around Salta are home to at least 40 other burial sites from ritual sacrifices, but Dr. Miremont said the native people who live in those regions do not want more bodies taken away.

“We will respect their wishes,” Dr. Miremont said, adding that three mummies were enough. “It is not necessary to break any more graves. We would like to have good relations with the Indian people.”




Rare Dolphin Seen in China, Experts Say
By REUTERS, The New York Times, August 30, 2007

BEIJING, Aug. 29 (Reuters) — A Chinese man has videotaped a large white animal swimming in the Yangtze River that experts say is a member of a dolphin species unique to China and feared extinct, the official Xinhua news agency said Wednesday.

The last confirmed sighting of a member of the species, the long-beaked, nearly blind baiji, was in 2004. After an international team failed to find a single dolphin on a six-week expedition along the Yangtze last year, the species was classified as critically endangered and possibly extinct. But the videotape from central Anhui Province may renew slim hopes for the survival of the creature, also known as the white-flag dolphin.

“I never saw such a big thing in the water before, so I filmed it,” Zeng Yujiang, who spotted the dolphin, told Xinhua. He said it was about 1,000 yards away and “jumped out of water several times.” Wang Kexiong, of the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the institute had confirmed that a baiji was on the videotape.

In the late 1970s, scientists believed several hundred baiji were still alive, but by 1997 a survey listed just 13 sightings. Found only in the Yangtze, the baiji is related to freshwater dolphin species found in the Mekong, Indus, Ganges and Amazon Rivers.

China has set up a reserve in a lake in Hubei Province but has found no baiji to put in it.




Warming Is Seen as Wiping Out Most Polar Bears
By JOHN M. BRODER and ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, September 8, 2007

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — Two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will disappear by 2050, even under moderate projections for shrinking summer sea ice caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, government scientists reported on Friday.

The finding is part of a yearlong review of the effects of climate and ice changes on polar bears to help determine whether they should be protected under the Endangered Species Act. Scientists estimate the current polar bear population at 22,000.

The report, which the United States Geological Survey released here, offers stark prospects for polar bears as the world grows warmer.

The scientists concluded that, while the bears were not likely to be driven to extinction, they would be largely relegated to the Arctic archipelago of Canada and spots off the northern Greenland coast, where summer sea ice tends to persist even in warm summers like this one, a shrinking that could be enough to reduce the bear population by two-thirds.

The bears would disappear entirely from Alaska, the study said.

“As the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear,” said Steven Amstrup, lead biologist for the survey team.

The report was released as President Bush was in Australia meeting with Asian leaders to try to agree on a strategy to address global warming. Mr. Bush will be host to major industrial nations in Washington this month to discuss the framework for a treaty on climate change.

The United Nations plans to devote its general assembly in the fall to global warming.

A spokeswoman for the White House declined to comment on the report, saying it was part of decision making at the Interior Department, parent of the survey.

In the report, the team said, “Sea ice conditions would have to be substantially better than even the most conservative computer simulations of warming and sea ice” to avoid the anticipated drop in bear population.

In a conference call with reporters, the scientists also said the momentum to a warmer world with less Arctic sea ice — and fewer bears — would be largely unavoidable at least for decades, no matter what happened with emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide.

“Despite any mitigation of greenhouse gases, we’re going to see the same amount of energy in the system for 20, 30 or 40 years,” said Mark Myers, the survey director. “We would not expect to see any significant change in polar conditions regardless of mitigation.”

In other words, even in the unlikely event that all the major economies were to agree to rapid and drastic reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, the floating Arctic ice cap will continue to shrink at a rapid pace for the next 50 years, wiping out much of the bears’ habitat.

The report makes no recommendation on listing the bears as a threatened species or taking any action to slow ice cap damage. Such decisions are up to another Interior Department agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, which enforces the Endangered Species Act. That decision is due in January, officials have said. The wildlife agency had to make a determination on the status of a threatened species because of a suit by environmental groups like Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In some places, the bears have adapted to eating a wide range of food like snow geese and garbage. But the survey team said their fate was 84 percent linked to the extent of sea ice.

Separate studies of trends in Arctic sea ice by academic and government teams have solidified a picture of shrinking area in summers for decades to come.

A fresh analysis by scientists of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to be published Saturday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, says sea-ice coverage of the Arctic Ocean will decline by more than 40 percent before the summer of 2050, compared with the average ice extent from 1979 to 1999.

This summer the ice retreated much farther and faster than in any year since satellite tracking began in 1979, several Arctic research groups said.

John H. Broder reported from Washington, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.




Yoga Is More Than Just Showing Up, but That Does Help
By NORA ISAACS, The New York Times, September 6, 2007

AFTER taking just a handful of yoga classes, Lisa Lew didn’t know the plow from the plank and wasn’t overly impressed with the age-old discipline. Still, she decided to tag along with a co-worker for the first day of a promotion at Levitate Yoga, a Manhattan studio, where students had committed to 21 consecutive days of yoga.

Ms. Lew, a 36-year-old administrator for an investment bank, sweated and stretched through three weeks of poses — all for a promotional price of $120. She fought aches and soreness, got stronger, and afterward she felt reborn: she lost waistline inches, but also shed stress and her tendency to overreact.

After reaping the benefits of a daily practice, she now heads to Levitate four times a week. “It brings a lot of peacefulness to me,” Ms. Lew said.

As a way of creating loyal regulars out of monthly drop-ins, studio owners recently have pushed the self-serving idea that yoga is not to be done lightly, casually or sporadically. They have stopped short of telling erratic classgoers to give it up, but their message is loud and clear: committing to a regular practice is the only way to progress in life and on the mat.

Haphazard yogis are the norm nationwide: 25.7 percent practice once a week compared with the 8.7 percent who practice more than five times a week, according to a 2005 survey of 4,700 people conducted by Yoga Journal and Harris Interactive.

Some kinds of yoga like Ashtanga and Bikram have always recommended daily rigor. Referring to the creator of the latter discipline, Hope Wurdack, 47, a director for franchise operations of Bikram yoga in Los Angeles, said: “Bikram often says you eat every day; why wouldn’t you do your yoga every day?”

But these days, get-committed promotions like Levitate Yoga’s 21-day Sadhana (which means “spiritual discipline” in Sanskrit) are a dime a dozen. Funky Door Yoga in San Francisco offers 30 days for $29; Hot Spot Yoga in Crestwood, Ky., offers 30 days for $30. My Yoga Lounge in Sacramento offers 10 days for $10.

“In the past three years, these 30 days for $30-type offerings are one of the biggest growth areas of how studios market themselves and how they attract new students,” said Robert Murphy, chief sales and marketing officer at MindBody Online, which provides business-management software to 764 yoga studios and collects data on participation.

One reason for the slew of promotions is stiff competition and high attrition rates. “Yoga studios have to have programs like this because they have to continually replenish their students,” Mr. Murphy said. “The rule of thumb is that 30 percent of the students that you have today will not be here a year from now.”

But many studio owners say they sponsor monthlong back-to-back challenges not to pad their pockets but to wake up students.

“My motivation is to shift people from just going to a yoga class to really having a personal yoga practice,” said Cyndi Lee, the founder of Om Yoga in Manhattan, which had 100 people complete a recent 30-day challenge. “It’s kind of like going through a fire and coming out the other side.”

During such a trial by fire, students learn to practice even when they’re not in the mood, Ms. Lee said. They also learn to work on weaknesses instead of doing only poses that come effortlessly to them.

If yoga is about evolution, then coming once a week is nothing more than standing still, lifelong devotees say. “I have one student who started practicing regularly who has made more progress than most students have made in years,” said Sandra Nicht, who teaches Ashtanga and power yoga in the Baltimore area.

Yet, yoga hasn’t always been a daily enterprise, said Stuart Sovatsky, a yoga scholar based in San Francisco. For millenniums, the only people who practiced every day were monks who had dedicated themselves to spiritual life in lieu of marriage and family. “The way that it’s practiced now in daily life is quite new,” he said.

New is relative, of course. Everyday yoga started to gain momentum in the early 1900s, Mr. Sovatsky said, when a yoga teacher named Krishnamacharya was commissioned to create a fitness practice for the children in Mysore Palace in India. He came up with a vigorous style of yoga based on dance and gymnastics and ended up teaching this style to students like Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar, who would ultimately bring a form of this to the West.

Even if students stay loyal to a studio, it doesn’t necessarily mean handsome profits. Tricia Neumann, 46, a horseback riding instructor from Earlysville, Va., was once a “haphazard yogi.” A 30-day challenge at Bikram Yoga Charlottesville changed that. Dozens of people took part, and wrote encouraging notes to fellow participants on a large poster as if signing a yearbook.

Daily practice became Ms. Neumann’s daily bread so much so that the $100 she now pays monthly for unlimited classes feels like a steal. “I feel like I’m really getting my money’s worth,” Ms. Neumann said. “I go so much, they aren’t making any money on me.”

For some in the industry, dirt-cheap promotions, especially those offering 30 days for $30, have a downside. “To me, to basically give it away for free like that, a dollar a class, devalues what the service is,” said Joan Barnes, who owns three YogaStudios in the San Francisco Bay area. “We get what we pay for, ultimately.”

Not everyone agrees that daily yoga is necessarily a boon to health. Sal Fichera, an exercise physiologist in Manhattan who has had clients with yoga injuries, warns against it: “There is such a thing as too much of a good thing,” he said. He believes that yoga every day is too much of a physical shock for beginners. “A person needs a day of rest to see how the body is adapting,” he said.

Not to mention, Mr. Fichera said, most yoga doesn’t encompass the four parameters necessary for total fitness: aerobics, flexibility, muscular strength, muscular endurance.

As much as studios nudge dabblers to become devotees, it can have the opposite effect. Jeffrey Vock, 45, a photographer, said that completing a promotion called 21 Club at Devotion Yoga in Hoboken, N.J., made him kinder and more aware of his aging body.

But ultimately, his yoga spree was too much. “I felt like I overdid it and came out feeling kind of sore,” Mr. Vock said. “When I was done, I felt like I needed a break from yoga.”

Comments

[resurgam.livejournal.com]

Wow, great articles today!

[brdgt.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[monkeyhouse.livejournal.com]

y'know, if my yoga studio was closer to where i live, i think i'd go at least 4X a week. but every day? wow. i don't know if i could do it.

[brdgt.livejournal.com]

Mine is only two blocks away, but the whole process still takes two hours out of my day that I could be doing a lot of other things.

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

This was a great set - that Incan mummy photo is incredible! And the Yangtze River dolphin may not be extinct, after all!

That yoga one has really inspired me to take a class - but the Nat and Serf don't offer any when I can take them (or more than once a week). Grr!

[brdgt.livejournal.com]

I find that taking one class a week and a daily 20 minute practice is just right. Doing more than one actual class a week would just be too time consuming for me.

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

At this stage, I'd definitely agree with you. I was hoping to find something maybe twice a week, three max, so that I could get back in the habit of doing it multiple times (since I don't have tivo'd hot chicks to watch!). I wish they'd start the daily lunch short sessions at the Union they were doing last year.

[brdgt.livejournal.com]

You could do five minutes of stretching, five minutes of sun salutations, five minutes of warrior poses, and five minutes of cool down - no hot chicks required!