Nature's mummy process

Question: Egyptian mummies of 6,000 years ago — people and pets — you've heard about. But how about mummies out of "Nature's freezer" from 10,000-40,000 years ago?

Answers: In Egypt, some 70 million people over a 3,000-year span wound up going through the elaborate two-month mummification process, and not just the pharaohs but virtually everyone who could afford it, says Jocelyn Selim in "Discover" magazine. Millions of animal mummies were buried right alongside their owners.

Nature did it cheaper and simpler. Animals such as woolly mammoths, stag moose and steppe bison were preserved in the perennially frozen tundra, or permafrost, of northern Russia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada and Alaska. They underwent a form of natural mummification, resulting in desiccated or dried-out bodies, says Ian M. Lange in "Ice Age Mammals of North America." Not freeze-dried in the camping food sense but rather with body moisture frozen in place, and in time the ice separated from the carcass, leaving behind a shrunken, dried body.

This happened to early people as well, such as the "bog men" of Scandinavia. The remains of hair, skin, innards and facial features add greatly to our knowledge of Pleistocene life.

Preservation of some animal cadavers is so good, adds Val Geist of the University of Calgary, that a friend made soup from well-preserved horse bones (awful!) and the neck of a 35,000-year-old Alaska long-horned bison (not bad). "Some 18 ice ages have come and gone over the past 2 million years, with only mummies of the last ice age still around."

Question: From a Helena, Montana reader: "You hear a lot about the 'windchill factor' on the Weather Channel. How do you figure WC anyway—what's the formula?"

Answers: It'll be a cold day in Helena or anywhere else before people start committing this one to memory, or the Celsius version either: Windchill (F) = 35.74 + .6215T - 35.75(V to .16 power) + .4275T(V to .16 power), where T is temperature and V is wind speed in mph, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service. Uggh! You can use your calculator to figure that a 15 mph wind will make 0 degrees F feel like -19F to people or animals (far easier is to consult a WC chart!). Though your car's radiator won't "feel" the WC, it will drop to the ambient temperature faster. For example, if it's -5 outside with -26 WC, your car will feel only the -5 but will chill down faster once leaving the garage.

Question: Blood found at the scene of a murder is probably the killer's but the DNA doesn't match any in the database. So how can authorities draw up a sketch of the murderer's face for their search? Assume it's sometime in the future and the science of genetics has progressed accordingly.