Wednesday, February 17, 2010

King Tut Was Disabled, Malarial, and Inbred, DNA Shows



King Tut may be seen as the golden boy of ancient Egypt today, but during his reign, Tutankhamun wasn't exactly a strapping sun god.
Instead, a new DNA study says, King Tut was a frail pharaoh, beset by malaria and a bone disorder—and possibly compromised by his newly discovered incestuous origins. 
The report is the first DNA study ever conducted with ancient Egyptian royal mummies. It apparently solves several mysteries surrounding King Tut, including how he died and who his parents were.
"He was not a very strong pharaoh. He was not riding the chariots," said study team member Carsten Pusch, a geneticist at Germany's University of Tübingen. "Picture instead a frail, weak boy who had a bit of a club foot and who needed a cane to walk."
Regarding the revelation that King Tut's mother and father were brother and sister, Pusch said, "Inbreeding is not an advantage for biological or genetic fitness. Normally the health and immune system are reduced and malformations increase," he said.
Tutankhamun was a pharaoh during ancient Egypt's New Kingdom era, about 3,300 years ago. He ascended to the throne at the age of 9 but ruled for only ten years before dying at 19 around 1324 B.C
Despite his brief reign, King Tut is perhaps Egypt's best known pharaoh because of the wealth of treasures—including a solid gold death mask—found during the surprise discovery of his intact tomb in 1922. 
The new study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, marks the first time the Egyptian government has allowed genetic studies to be performed using royal mummies.
"This will open to us a new era," said project leader Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. 
"I'm very happy this is an Egyptian project, and I'm very proud of the work that we did."
In the new study, the mummies of King Tut and ten other royals that researchers have long suspected were his close relatives were examined. Of these ten, the identities of only three had been known for certain.
Using DNA samples taken from the mummies' bones, the scientists were able to create a five-generation family tree for the boy pharaoh.
The team looked for shared genetic sequences in the Y chromosome—a bundle of DNA passed only from father to son—to identify King Tut's male ancestors. The researchers then determined parentage for the mummies by looking for signs that a mummy's genes are a blend of a specific couple's DNA.
In this way, the team was able to determine that a mummy known until now as KV55 is the "heretic king" Akhenaten—and that he was King Tut's father. Akhenaten was best known for abolishing ancient Egypt's pantheon in favor of worshipping only one god.
Furthermore, the mummy known as KV35 was King Tut's grandfather, the pharaoh Amenhotep III, whose reign was marked by unprecedented prosperity.
Preliminary DNA evidence also indicates that two stillborn fetuses entombed with King Tut when he died were daughters whom he likely fathered with his chief queen Ankhensenamun, whose mummy may also have finally been identified. 
Also, a mummy previously known as the Elder Lady is Queen Tiye, King Tut's grandmother and wife of Amenhotep III.
King Tut's mother is a mummy researchers had been calling the Younger Lady.
While the body of King Tut's mother has finally been revealed, her identity remains a mystery. DNA studies show that she was the daughter of Amenhotep III and Tiye and thus was the full sister of her husband, Akhenaten.
Some Egyptologists have speculated that King Tut's mother was Akhenaten's chief wife, Queen Nefertiti—made famous by an iconic bust (Nefertiti-bust picture). But the new findings seem to challenge this idea, because historical records do not indicate that Nefertiti and Akhenaten were related.
Instead, the sister with whom Akenhaten fathered King Tut may have been a minor wife or concubine, which would not have been unusual, said Willeke Wendrich, a UCLA Egyptologist who was not involved in the study.
"Egyptian pharaohs had multiple wives, and often multiple sons who would potentially compete for the throne after the death of their father," Wendrich said.
Inbreeding would also not have been considered unusual among Egyptian royalty of the time.
The team's examination of King Tut's body also revealed previously unknown deformations in the king's left foot, caused by the necrosis, or death, of bone tissue.
"Necrosis is always bad, because it means you have dying organic matter inside your body," study team member Pusch told National Geographic News.
The affliction would have been painful and forced King Tut to walk with a cane—many of which were found in his tomb—but it would not have been life threatening.
Malaria, however, would have been a serious danger.
The scientists found DNA from the mosquito-borne parasite that causes malaria in the young pharaoh's body—the oldest known genetic proof of the disease.
The team found more than one strain of malaria parasite, indicating that King Tut caught multiple malarial infections during his life. The strains belong to the parasite responsible for malaria tropica, the most virulent and deadly form of the disease.
The malaria would have weakened King Tut's immune system and interfered with the healing of his foot. These factors, combined with the fracture in his left thighbone, which scientists had discovered in 2005, may have ultimately been what killed the young king, the authors write.
Until now the best guesses as to how King Tut died have included a hunting accident, a blood infection, a blow to the head, and poisoning.
UCLA's Wendrich said the new finding "lays to rest the completely baseless theories about the murder of Tutankhamun." 
Another speculation apparently laid to rest by the new study is that Akhenaten had a genetic disorder that caused him to develop the feminine features seen in his statutes, including wide hips, a potbelly, and the female-like breasts associated with the condition gynecomastia.
When the team analyzed Akhenaten's body using medical scanners, no evidence of such abnormalities were found. Hawass and his team concluded that the feminized features found in the statues of Akenhaten created during his reign were done for religious and political reasons.
In ancient Egypt, Akhenaten was a god, Hawass explained. "The poems said of him, 'you are the man, and you are the woman,' so artists put the picture of a man and a woman in his body."
Egyptologist John Darnell of Yale University called the revelation that Akhenaten's appearance was not due to genetic disorders "the most important result" of the new study.
In his book Tutankhamun's Armies, Darnell proposes that Akhenaten's androgynous appearance in art was an attempt to associate himself with Aten, the original creator god in Egyptian theology, who was neither male nor female.
"Akenhaten is odd in his appearance because he belongs to the time of creation, not because he was physically different," said Darnell, who also did not participate in the DNA research.
"People will now need to consider Akenhaten as a thinker, and not just as an Egyptian Quasimodo."
The generally good condition of the DNA from the royal mummies of King Tut's family surprised many members of the team.
Indeed, its quality was better than DNA gathered from nonroyal Egyptian mummies several centuries younger, study co-author Pusch said.
The DNA of the Elder Lady, for example, "was the most beautiful DNA that I've ever seen from an ancient specimen," Pusch said.
The team suspects that the embalming method the ancient Egyptians used to preserve the royal mummies inadvertently protected DNA as well as flesh. 
"The ingredients used to embalm the royals was completely different in both quantity and quality compared to the normal population in ancient times," Pusch explained.
Preserving DNA "was not the aim of the Egyptian priest of course, but the embalming method they used was lucky for us."








Verizon Swallows Hard And Embraces Skype


Verizon bowed to the inevitable today andofficially embraced Skype on its smartphones, starting with Blackberry and Android devices. Verizon customers will now be able to bypass the outlandish international calling rates on their mobile phones and make free Skype-to-Skype calls or use their much cheaper Skype Out minutes instead. Skype’s text IM will also work on the phones.
VoIP applications like Skype’s have gone from facing resistance from the carriers to a reluctant acceptance. Skype already offers one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, and at least it encourages more data usage, which subscribers do pay for. Skype accounted for 12 percent of all international calling minutes last year, and that number will just keep going up.
Apps like Skype, along with Web browsing and email, will get consumers hooked on bigger and bigger data plans. Verizon wants to sell that data pipe and fill it with the most attractive applications. It might lose out at first as people migrate from making overpriced international calls, but over time building out its recurring data subscription revenues will be a bigger business than international call revenues, which it must share with carriers in other countries and typically are sporadic for most subscribers.
Update: Some more details from Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch . He reports that the Skype calls actually will not go over Verizon’s 3G network, but rather over its regular voice network until they hit a network operations center where they will be transferred over to Skype’s Level 3 backbone. This makes more sense, since a high volume of Skype calls over Verizon’s wireless 3G data network could overwhelm it. By striking this deal, Verizon treats the calls as regular local voice calls before passing them off to Skype. So it is actually saving its data network for other uses. But you’ve got to wonder what kind of deal Skype struck and what, if any, share of Skype Out revenues Verizon will collect for calls originating from Verizon cell phones.

Why the Technology Sector Should Care About Google Books


Antitrust lawyer and Open Book Alliance  leaderGary Reback has been called the “antitrust champion” and the “protector of the marketplace” by the National Law Journal, and has been at the forefront of many of the most important antitrust cases of the last three decades. He is one of the mostvocal opponents of the Google Books settlement. Iinterviewed Reback a few months ago, and Google Books was one of the topics we discussed. In the column below, Reback discusses Google Books and its ties to Google search.
This Thursday leaders of the international publishing industry will watch with bated breath as a federal judge in New York hears arguments over whether to approve the Google Book Settlement.
More a complicated joint venture among Google and five big New York publishers than the resolution of pending litigation, the proposed settlement once promised unprecedented access to millions of out-of-print books through digital sales to consumers and online research subscriptions for libraries. But with the passage of time and the ability to examine the deal more closely, the promises proved illusory. The big publishers, as it turns out, have reserved the right to negotiate secret deals with Google for the books they claim through the settlement.
Meanwhile, torrents of outrage rained down on the New York court – from authors whose ownership rights will be appropriated through the settlement’s procedures, from librarians fearful of price exploitation by Google, from privacy advocates worried that Google will monitor the reading habits of library patrons, from libertarians incensed over the use of a legal procedure to effect the widespread appropriation of property, from digital booksellers concerned about Google’s unfair advantage in the marketplace.
Actually, those in the tech community should be watching the settlement proceedings more closely than anyone else. We have the most to lose if the deal is approved in its present form because, at bottom, the Google Book Settlement is not really about books. It’s really about search, the most important technology in the new economy.
According to the Department of Justice, Google dominates the market for search advertising and search syndication on the Web, with greater than a 70% share in both markets. These markets are difficult to enter because of powerful network effects and scale characteristics. Recent entry has been all but futile; indeed, the company with the second largest share, Yahoo, is leaving the market.
The search markets are special and different – even from other web markets. Google’s dominant share in these markets means that substantial numbers of web-based enterprises secure much of their business through “referrals” from Google’s search engine or advertisements placed by Google’s ad platform. The dominant market share makes Google the arbiter of each web business (books or medical supplies, as examples). In each case, Google decides which company succeeds and which company fails by its placement in search results and ad listings on the Google site.
The industry’s fear of Google has grown exponentially, right along with the company’s influence on web commerce. Not six months ago a prominent executive from a top web site – who withheld his name for fear of retribution – made an astounding proposal in a TechCrunch post. Noting from his own experience the potential for abuse inherent in Google’s power, the executive called for government regulation of the search markets to prevent manipulation of search results and ad listings.
The last six months have confirmed the anonymous executive’s worst fears. Once upon a time, Google claimed it employed neutral, mathematically-based algorithms to prioritize search in ad listings. But last November Google admitted to the Washington Post that only search results from Google’s content competitors are listed according to neutral algorithms. Search results from Google’s own properties, like maps, news and books, are now listed first, the algorithmnotwithstanding. Even more recently Google admitted that it changes the rank ordering of paid search ads to prioritize its own company messages.
Whatever the advisability of government regulation, few would dispute that we need more and better competition in search to curb Google’s power. But Google is doing its best to keep that from ever happening. That’s where the Book Settlement comes in. Google intends to use the settlement to disadvantage its competitors and to bolster its own position in search.
Google announced its project to scan and digitize books in December 2004. Both commercial and not-for-profit entities started scanning books before Google did. Several other rivals started scanning books shortly after Google announced its project. All of these competitorsscanned (pdf) only books in the public domain or for which they secured the rightsholder’s permission. Google, on the other hand, scanned all books in the collections of some of the nation’s leading research libraries, including those still under copyright, without securing permission from the rightsholders.
In the fall of 2005, five New York publishers along with the Authors Guild sued Google for copyright infringement. After three years of secret negotiations, and without taking a single deposition in the case, the parties announced a settlement on October 28, 2008. Through a legal ploy known as a “class certification” (which must be approved by the court), the plaintiffs who brought the suit now claim to speak for all holders of U.S. copyrights. Their proposed settlement gives Google (among other things) the right, in response to search queries, to display lengthy textual excerpts from just about every out-of-print book with a U.S. copyright (unless the rightsholder affirmatively objects) – tens of millions of books, in all.
Very recent results from scientific studies of web searching explain why Google has spent enormous amounts of money to acquire the digital rights to vast numbers of old, dusty books. Most search queries are directed to popular subjects – shopping, travel, medical information, etc. Some queries, though, are directed to more obscure subject matter. These are known as “rare,” “obscure,” “esoteric,” or, sometimes, “tail” queries, in reference to the “tailing off” portion of a graph showing the frequency distribution of a population (search queries, in this case) exhibiting the Pareto principle, known to everyone who sells products as the 80-20 rule. Most queries are directed to a few (relatively speaking) popular subjects and therefore show up in the “fat” part of the frequency curve. The frequency of increasingly obscure queries “tails off” asymptotically, providing a “long tail” to the right of the “fat” part of the curve.
For a time, computer scientists thought that most obscure queries were generated by only a few users (again, speaking relatively), and, hence, search engines could ignore obscure tail queries and still serve the great bulk of the user population. But research has shown that just about everyone makes a rare query from time to time. And, people decide which engine to use for their everyday search needs based on the engine’s ability to satisfy these rare queries, just as one would expect in a world that values “one-stop shopping.” Stated more formally, satisfying demand in the tail increases consumption in the “head” or fat part of the distribution curve.
Google will get an enormous advantage over its search competitors if it can support (i.e., respond satisfactorily to) tail queries that its competitors cannot. Scientific research shows that supporting tail queries produces a disproportionately large increase in overall user satisfaction – i.e., disproportionately increases the size of the user population highly satisfied with the engine’s performance. In fact, according to the most recent study, satisfying an additional 1% tail queries increases overall user satisfaction with the engine more than 5% — this, in a market in which companies battle fiercely to wrest even a tenth of a point in market share away from Google’s control.
Digital rights to virtually all out-of-print books will provide Google with a decisive advantage in responding to tail queries. Google created its book database by scanning the collections of the nation’s leading research libraries. These libraries consist largely of academic works on a wide variety of obscure subjects. The books contain information relevant to all kinds of rare queries. Much of the older information in the books might not be available from other sources, at least on the public web. Whatever the publication value of these books, they provide an enormous advantage in search. Indeed, presentations by Google within the last couple of months confirm that the company expects to use text from digital books to satisfy many of its users’ tail queries. If Google can stretch its advantage even further and deny its search rivals the ability to integrate the same corpus of books, Google’s lead in search will become insurmountable.
The proposed settlement does just that, leaving Google’s search competitors out in the cold. The settlement provides no means at all for competitors to get rights to so-called “orphan works” – in-copyright books whose rightsholders cannot be located. According to the parties’ court filings made just last week, ownership has been claimed for only about one million books out of the more than 12 million books scanned and the 170 million unique works identified by Google, leaving the company with exclusive digital rights to well over 90% of U.S. books. In addition, the settlement sets up procedures that make it easy for Google to clear rights to all other out-of-print works where rightsholders can be located, but leaves rivals without a mechanism to easily resolve disputes over ownership and copyright status that preclude competitive distribution. If approved in its current form, then, the settlement will solidify Google’s hold on the search market by giving the company exclusive rights to millions upon millions of books.
Under some circumstances, Google might be entitled to a competitive advantage that it secured through superior foresight. But, that’s not what happened here. The publisher plaintiffs demanded that Google’s competitors respect claims of copyright in their scanning, even as they secretly negotiated (pdf) with Google to give that company the settlement deal the plaintiffs never offered to Google’s competitors. The Department of Justice made the point most clearly in its brief. Google’s search dominance, DoJ said, may be further entrenched by its “exclusive access to content” through the settlement.
This outcome has not been achieved by a technological advance in search or by operation of normal market forces; rather, it is the direct product of scanning millions of books without the copyright holders’ consent and then using [class action procedures] to achieve results not otherwise obtainable in the market.
Permitting a company to solidify its dominance over all of web commerce through controversial legal stratagems rather than open market competition invites economic disaster. Likely, the judge will see Google’s ploy in that light, just as the Justice Department did. If not, government regulation might well be our only recourse.