Questões de Concurso

Mysterious ancient cemetery in Egypt could contain a million mummies


A mysterious ancient cemetery in Egypt could contain more than a million mummified human remains, archaeologists have claimed.
Around 1,700 bodies have so far been uncovered at the Fag el-Gamous (Way of the Water Buffalo) site, around 60 miles south of Cairo. But experts believe that countless more are contained in the burial ground.
“We are fairly certain we have over a million burials within this cemetery. It's large, and it's dense, ” said project director Kerry Muhlestein, an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University (BYU), which has been examining the site for around 30 years. They were placed there between the 1st and the 7th centuries AD, but the scale of the site has left many baffled. A nearby village has been deemed too small to warrant such a large cemetery, while the closest major settlements had their own burial grounds.
“It's hard to know where all these people were coming from, ” Professor Muhlestein told Live Science.
Another interesting find was that the corpses appeared to be grouped together by hair colour, with one section containing the remains of those with blonde hair and another for those with red hair. The bodies, which included a man of more than seven feet in height, are thought to be of ordinary citizens, rather than the royalty found at many famous Egyptian sites. They were not buried in coffins, according to Muhlestein, and were in fact mummified not by design but by the arid natural environment.
“The people in the cemetery represent the common man. They are the average people who are usually hard to learn about because they are not very visible in written sources. A lot of their wealth, or the little that they had, was poured into these burials.”
His team discovered objects including glassware, jewellery and linen. The findings were presented to the Scholars Colloquim at the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities in Toronto last month.
The Telegraph, London.

(http://www.traveller.com.au/mysterious-ancient-cemetery-in-egypt-could-contain-a-
million-mummies-12aaq7.)

Eating well may count more than exercise for weight loss: study

(By Lizette Borreli on 2/12/17 AT 9:10 AM.)

We’ve all heard that to lose weight we need to do two things: eat less, exercise more. This makes sense: Burning more calories than we consume will lead to weight loss. But this exercise-based approach provides only short-term results. Now, researchers at Loyola University of Chicago confirm that a healthy diet, not exercise, is the key to losing weight – and keeping it off.

“Our study results indicate that physical activity may not protect you from gaining weight, ” said Lara Dugas, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, in a statement.

Previous research has found exercise does help people lose weight by burning fat. A 10-month study split 141 obese or overweight people into three groups to see how cardio affected them – group 1 had to burn 400 calories doing cardio,5 days a week; group 2 had to burn 600 calories doing cardio,5 days a week; and group 3 did no exercise. Most participants lost 4.3 percent of their body weight in group 1; group 2 lost a little more at 5.7 percent; and the control group actually gained 0.5 percent.

The benefits of exercise on weight are notable, but most studies don't take into account its behavioral effects. For example, working out makes people hungrier, which means they are more likely to consume more calories. This suggests how much and what we eat has a bigger impact on our weight than exercise.

In the new study, published in Peer J, Dugas and her colleagues examined about 2,000 adults from the U.S. and four other countries: Ghana, South Africa, Jamaica and Seychelles, to measure their physical activity levels and weight change throughout the course of three years. Participants wore tracking devices – accelerometers – on their waists for a week, to track their energy expenditure and step count. Weight, height and body fat were also measured at baseline, one year and two years after.

In the beginning, Ghana participants had the lowest average weights (139 pounds for both men and women), and Americans the highest weights (202 pounds for women,206 pounds for men). Ghanaians were more fit han Americans; 76 Ghanaian men and 44 percent Ghanaian women met the U.S. Surgeon General physical activity guidelines, while only 44 percent of American men and 20 percent of American women met the guidelines. Adults need 2 hours and 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, like brisk walking, each week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Surprisingly, participants with higher rates of physical activity actually gained more weight than those with lower rates. American men who met the guidelines gained a half pound per year, while American men who did not meet the guidelines lost 0.6 pounds. This shows there's no significant relationship between sedentary time at baseline, and subsequent weight gain or weight loss. The only factors that were significantly linked to weight at baseline were age and gender.

“From our study it is not evident that higher volumes of PA [physical activity] alone are protective against future weight gain, and by deduction our data suggest that other environmental factors such as the food environment may have a more critical role”, concluded the researchers.

Exercise-focused weight loss regimens yield low success rates because we tend to poorly estimate calories we consume and calories we burn. For example, a 2010 study found when participants were asked to consume the amount of food they believed they burned in calories, they ended up eating two to three times the amount of calories they burned. This suggests calorie expenditure doesn’t really count for much.

Diet is a major factor in weight control; portion sizes and what we're eating is crucial to maintaining a healthy body weight. To lose weight and improve health, we need to both eat well and find the time to exercise.

(Available: http://www.newsweek.com/eating-well-count-more-exercise-weight-loss-554821.)

How things work: 100 scientific explanations

Preservation property has always been important to humans. Historians in the ninth century were the first to record the use of varnish, a protective liquid composed of resins, natural oils, and alcohol, among other ingredients. Furniture makers learned that if they painted coats of the stuff on a piece of furniture or wood floor, it made it impervious to liquids and their damage and shielded it from normal wear and tear. And the makers liked the shine furniture had after it was varnished.

Varnish comes in many formulations. Some are oil based, using linseed or tung oil, while others are water-based. Varnish cures, or dries, on what it’s painted, creating a glossy, clear film on the surface. Some oil-based varnishes can turn to a yellowish color; water-based varieties do not. Wood must be carefully cleaned and sanded before any varnish is applied. Several coats are often required. All varnishes contain resins — terpenes with five-carbon molecules called isoprenes and also include a drying oil or solvent to reduce drying time.

Although furniture and flooors are still the most frequently varnished items, the wooden hulls of boats are also often varnished. Clear nail polish, a type of varnish, can be used for countless small fixes: dab small amounts to keep splintered wood from snagging, prevent ink from running, and stop buttons on clothing or screws on sunglasses from coming loose.

(National Geographic Special Publication “How Things Work” Adapted.)