Learn about a pregnant mummy; the three body problem; and why you should take off your shoes when you enter your house. A newly discovered pregnant mummy is raising questions about ancient Egyptian beliefs by Grant Currin Johnson, S. (2021, May 5). First-ever pregnant Egyptian mummy discovered. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/pregnant-mummy In a First, Researchers Discover a Pregnant Egyptian Mummy. (2021). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/world/europe/egyptian-mummy-pregnant-warsaw.html Ejsmond, W., Ożarek-Szilke, M., Jaworski, M., & Szilke, S. (2021). A pregnant ancient egyptian mummy from the 1st century BC. Journal of Archaeological Science, 105371. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2021.105371 New development in solving the three body problem by Briana Brownell Kervella, P., Thévenin, F., & Lovis, C. (2017). Proxima’s orbit around α Centauri. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 598, L7. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201629930 Alpha Centauri System | Facts, Information, History & Definition. (2019, December 6). The Nine Planets. https://nineplanets.org/alpha-centauri-system/ Wood,LiveScience, C. (2021, May 7). Physicists Edge Closer to Taming the Three-Body Problem. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-edge-closer-to-taming-the-three-body-problem/ How Important Is It to Take Your Shoes Off as Soon as You Get in the House? originally aired May 7, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/aliens-studying-humans-an-ai-fairy-tale-and-the-im Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free!
Learn about a pregnant mummy; the three body problem; and why you should take off your shoes when you enter your house.
A newly discovered pregnant mummy is raising questions about ancient Egyptian beliefs by Grant Currin
New development in solving the three body problem by Briana Brownell
How Important Is It to Take Your Shoes Off as Soon as You Get in the House? originally aired May 7, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/aliens-studying-humans-an-ai-fairy-tale-and-the-im
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free!
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/we-found-the-first-pregnant-mummy-ever-documented
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how a newly discovered pregnant mummy could change what we know about ancient Egypt; a new development in solving the three body problem; and how important it is to take off your shoes when you enter your house.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Scientists in Poland made a surprising discovery while systematically reviewing their collection of mummies. Turns out the mummy they thought was a male priest named Hor-Djehuty was actually pregnant. It’s a big deal because she’s the first pregnant mummy ever documented.
The scientists are calling her “The mysterious lady of the National Museum in Warsaw,” which is going to be a real pain to fill in on scantrons. She was in her 20s and probably lived during the first century BC. They think she had a high status in Egyptian society because the body was decked out with a quote “rich set of amulets,” unquote, wrapped in linen and other fabrics, and probably buried in the royal tombs of Thebes [THEEBZ].
The Lady was donated to the University of Warsaw in 1826. The funny thing is that they knew at the time that the mummy was female. The change happened later when researchers translated the hieroglyphs on the coffin, which said it was a male priest. The team behind the new discovery thinks the mummy may have been put in the wrong coffin by mistake.
Imaging done in the 90s showed a, quote, “anomaly” in the pelvic region, which just added more evidence that the mummy was male. However, that anomaly was actually the tiny, mummified leg of a fetus. The researchers think it was between 26 and 30 weeks old.
Egyptologists know that ancient Egyptians held a complex set of beliefs about the afterlife. The reason they mummified people in the first place was to preserve a person’s physical body so the spirit could make its journey into the next world. That process usually involved removing internal organs, embalming them, and returning them to the body. The fact the same hadn’t been done to the fetus raises a lot of questions: was it a way to ensure it went to the afterlife with its mother? Or was it just too difficult to remove without causing damage?
Researchers have learned a lot about beliefs and practices in ancient Egypt — shoutout to the Rosetta Stone — but they don’t know that much about the beliefs regarding women or pregnancy. That’s what makes this such an important discovery. With any luck, future research on “the mysterious lady of the National Museum in Warsaw” will offer a window into topics ranging from prenatal healthcare to religious beliefs about unborn children in the afterlife.
A physicist from Hebrew University of Jerusalem has made a major breakthrough in the notoriously difficult “three body problem,” which has stumped scientists for hundreds of years.
The three body problem explores how celestial bodies like stars and planets affect each other’s motion through gravity. Newton’s equations can use the position and velocity of these objects to tell us how they influence each other’s motion. But there’s a problem. The equations are easy to solve for two objects, but adding a third one creates a major complication: it makes the system chaotic.
And this is more than just a frustrating math problem. It applies to lots of things in the universe, including our next door neighbors in the galaxy, the Alpha Centauri system. Alpha Centauri is a system of three stars: two twin stars about the same size of our sun that orbit each other, and a smaller red dwarf sibling, Proxima Centauri, orbiting them both much farther out. Although it looks steady now, the problem child Proxima could destabilize the whole system, crash into one of its sister stars, or be ejected into space and leave the system permanently.
Even super-precise measurements and simulations can’t tell us when and how a system like Alpha Centauri will eventually collapse. That’s because of the “butterfly effect.” Just like something as small as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can create an unexpected tornado on the other side of the world, one tiny difference in our measurements of a chaotic system can produce a shocking result.
No wonder the three body problem is one of the toughest problems in physics.
But this new work takes an important step forward by attacking the problem in a different way. Instead of trying to solve the equations, scientists looked at them in terms of probabilities.
They calculated how likely it was that each of the three bodies will be ejected from the system through time. The results showed that there are times where the system becomes what the researchers call “leaky,” and quite likely that one of the bodies would escape the system, interspersed with times where the system was relatively stable.
Not only can this result be used to predict the future of systems like Alpha Centauri, it can also look into the past. Probabilities of various system events tell us how our solar system might have evolved. As a result, we can deepen our understanding of the origin of our own solar system as well as the galaxy and beyond.
The weather is getting pretty nice, so you might be spending more time outside… then inside… then outside again. Et cetera. This behavior comes with a small hygiene issue that you might not think about a whole lot. So here’s a clip from 2018 we remastered to help you keep your home happy and healthy.
[ASHLEY: 1:47 clip]
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
[ad lib optional]
ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Grant Currin and Briana Brownell
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Take off your shoes. You’ll be more comfortable anyway! Then, join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!