Enlarge (credit: Saleem and Hawass 2021)

CT scans of a mummified Egyptian pharaoh, once suspected to be the victim of a palace assassination, suggest that he was actually executed after being captured in battle in the mid-16th century BCE.

Pharaoh Seqenenre led his army from Upper Egypt in the 1550s BCE to face the Hyksos, a group of warriors from the Levant who occupied Lower Egypt and demanded tribute from Upper Egypt during what historians call the Second Intermediate Period. It’s known that Seqenenre died during this conflict, but it’s been unclear whether he was assassinated in his bed in the palace at Thebes or died on the battlefield.

A computed tomography (CT) scan offered a look at his wounds, along with the details of his mummification. Radiologist Sahar Saleem of Cairo University and former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass concluded that he most likely died near the front lines and was brought back to Thebes for mummification and burial.

Enlarge / Ophelia (1852) by John Everett Millais, inspired by the character in Shakespeare's Hamlet , who goes mad and drowns in a brook. It can be challenging for forensic scientists to determine how long a dead body has been submerged in water.

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: identifying potential biomarkers (in mice) for pegging time of death in waterlogged corpses.

Correctly estimating time of death looks so easy in fictional police procedurals, but it's one of the more challenging aspects of a forensic pathologist's job. This is particularly true for corpses found in water, where a multitude of additional variables make it even more difficult to determine how long a body has been submerged. A team of scientists at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK, have hit upon a new method for making that determination, involving the measurement of levels of certain proteins in bones. They described their findings in an April paper in the Journal of Proteome Research.

Co-author Noemi Procopio has been interested in forensic science since she was 14, but initially studied biotechnology because her home country of Italy didn't have forensic science programs. When she moved to the University of Manchester in the UK to complete her PhD, she chose to specialize in the application of proteomics  (the large-scale study of proteins) to the field, thanks to the influence of a former supervisor, an archaeologist who applied proteomics to bones.

Infamous historical cold cases get a scientific face-lift in The Curious Life and Death Of... , a new documentary series from the Smithsonian Channel. Hosted by author and medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris , each of the six episodes takes a fresh look at a famous death with a mystery attached to it and sifts through the scientific clues to (hopefully) arrive at fresh insights.

Per the official synopsis:

Author and medical historian Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris will use science, tests, and demonstrations to shed new light on famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Using her lab to perform virtual autopsies, experiment with blood samples, interview witnesses and conduct real-time demonstrations, Dr. Fitzharris will put everything about these mysterious deaths to the test. Along the way, she'll be joined by a revolving cast of experts, including Scotland Yard detectives, medical examiners, weapons gurus and more.

A noted science communicator with a large Twitter following and a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art , in 2017. (It's a great, if occasionally grisly, read.)