Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Mummy scan wins 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge award

The Challenge is intended to celebrate and encourage the visualization of research. First place in the photography category was a phtograph of the scan of a child mummy from the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum: "An Egyptian Child Mummy (Credits: W. Paul Brown, Robert Cheng, Rebecca Fahrig, Stanford University; Christof Reinhart, Volume Graphics). For, 75 years, this child mummy resided in the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, its body unseen by human eyes, its story a mystery. In 2005, a team of researchers and computer engineer Paul Brown of Stanford University began to unravel the threads of this mystery using the latest in imaging technology. Using a high-resolution scanner to generate 60,000 2D scans of the unwrapped mummy and applying addition 3D computer graphics created a 3d model of the mummy and its interior. Analysis of the data revealed that the 2,000-yer-old mummy is the remains of a 4-to-5 year old girl who, researchers concluded, likely died unexpectedly from an infectious disease."

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