The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 272 No 7290 p332
13 March 2004

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Is there life not as we know it on Mars? more
Lions were special to the ancient Egyptians more
Dispute over DNA profile of Romanovs more
Why you cannot understand what the opera diva is singing about more

Is there life not as we know it on Mars?

It seems odd that any project intending to determine whether life exists on an inhospitable planet such as Mars should concentrate on the search for water, liquid or solid, superficial or buried deep. Presumably, the reasoning is that without water there can be no life. Yet it is possible that there might be extraordinary forms of life other than “life as we know it”. In Nature for 1 January, Philip Ball examines this problem. As he points out, on our earth no living organism can function without water — described by the biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi as “the matrix of life”. Vast sums are being expended by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the US to probe the surface of Mars for evidence that water exists there, making possible living creatures.

It seems reasonable, writes Ball, to postulate that a liquid of some kind should be regarded as necessary for efficient mass transport in any living system. However, transport would be possible also in liquid carbon dioxide, a hydrocarbon or even ammonia. Water possesses unique properties of high heat capacity, expansion on freezing, maximum density at a temperature of 4C, high dielectric constant and other anomalies. Its molecular structure is dominated by the directional attractive interactions of hydrogen bonds, and not by molecular repulsions. This may be the secret of its association with living things.

It is nevertheless attractive to speculate whether water’s unique properties make it essential to the perpetuation of life. It is possible that the life force has exploited what water alone has to offer, rather than that life has arisen primarily because of the presence of water. Life of any conceivable sort requires the transmission of chemical information through molecular interactions. Yet some believe that enzymes may be discovered that can perform their function in non-aqueous media. So far, however, nothing else can mimic the useful biological functions performed by water.

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Lions were special to the ancient Egyptians

A commentary by French archaeologists, in the 15 January issue of Nature, throws some light on the status of the lion in ancient Egypt. Classical literary sources and inscriptions by various pharaohs have shown that lions were among the sacred animals bred and buried in the Nile valley, yet until recently no mummified lions have been discovered.

During excavation of the Bubasteion necropolis at Saqqara in 2001, however, a virtually complete skeleton of a male Panthera leo was revealed in catacombs containing many remains of cats, which were sacred animals among the Egyptians. The skeleton was unearthed in the tomb of Maia, the nurse of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, dating from the 14th century BC, and the site of a shrine to the feline goddess Bubastis. The beast had its head towards the north and was surrounded by many other animal bones and remains of coffins. Its skull was partly crushed and the scapula and femur had been damaged. Despite the lack of any linen bandage, which would indicate regular mummification, there was evidence that the lion had been treated as a sacred relic. There was no indication that the creature had been killed when young, and it is thought that it died naturally at an advanced age after having been kept for years in captivity.

The lion may have been looked upon as the incarnation of the god Mahes, son of the goddess Sekhmet or Bastet. Lions may have been bred in sanctuaries and eventually buried in a sacred necropolis.

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Dispute over DNA profile of Romanovs

There has been controversy for years over details of the demise of the Imperial Romanov dynasty of Russia. Richard Stone in Science for 6 February has described new investigations into the DNA analysis of the remains of tsar Nicholas II, his tsarina and three of their five children, whose bodies disappeared after they had been shot by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. In 1991 the remains of nine individuals unearthed from a shallow grave were pronounced by forensic experts to be those of the Romanov family, together with their doctor and three servants.

Now a new study by a team based at Stanford University has disputed the original claim. The analysis of mitochondrial DNA from the nine skeletons and from blood samples from living descendants of the tsarina, including the Duke of Edinburgh, has revealed some mismatches, and there is fierce disagreement over what this amounts to in terms of historical accuracy.

Critics assert that political influence in interpreting the evidence cannot be excluded. A widespread opinion is that perhaps it is high time the Romanovs were left in peace and not subjected to periodical reappraisals.

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Why you cannot understand what the opera diva is singing about

A group of physicists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney have made a study of the problems faced by operatic sopranos. Writing in the 8 January issue of Nature, they point out that a soprano may be asked to sing at frequencies that are “higher than the normal value for the lowest resonance of her vocal tract”. Any failure to use this resonance will reduce both vocal power and homogeneity in timbre. Towards the top of her range, the singer will increase the lowest resonance frequency to match that of her singing. This increases loudness and uniformity of tone, but at the expense of comprehensibility. Clarity of vowels is compromised when pitch frequency greatly exceeds resonance frequency. The problem may be overcome if the singer smiles when ascending the scale, to increase resonance frequency.

The researchers report a study involving eight sopranos, of whom four were professionals and four were advanced students. They averaged nine years’ classical training. They were asked to sing notes sustained for four seconds without vibrato in an ascending diatonic scale. They sang one of four vowels, at piano intensity, to a frequency of 1kHz.

The researchers found that the vowels were shifted significantly at high pitch, overlapped considerably and converged to smaller separations at which they grew confused. “This helps to explain the well-known difficulty in identifying words sung in the high range by sopranos and may be one of the reasons why opera houses often use surtitles even for operas sung in the native language of their audience,” comment the authors of the paper.

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