The Women of Stonehenge

Stonehenge—the ancient Neolithic monument in Wiltshire, England—was built approximately 4,000 – 5,000 years ago. The modern configuration of the henge was built over a span of nearly 2,000 years—from the initial shaping of the land, to construction of a timber structure, the transition to the first stone structure, and finally to the transport and configuration of the massive twenty-five ton sandstone blocks and their associated blue stones that remain on-site today.

Stonehenge was built and used during a time before history was documented in written records. While word of mouth passed down stories for generations, this many millennia after its creation, some of the purposes of Stonehenge have been lost to the ages. However, modern research proposes a number of uses for the site, including that it may be one of the oldest recorded organized burial grounds of both human and animal remains. It also served as an astronomical calendar, arranged to align with sunset at the winter solstice and sunrise at the summer solstice with a precision that is almost unbelievable considering the knowledge and tools of the time. It was used for religious ceremonies, and it has also been suggested Stonehenge was used as a place of healing based on the condition and associated traumas of the remains discovered on site.

Computer rendering of the completed Stonehenge

Stone Age human remains were recovered from Stonehenge in 2008 and have been studied by researchers at University College London. The original find revealed over two hundred cremated individuals in a chalk pit. From this, fourteen females and nine males were definitively identified using CT scans and radiocarbon dating to determine not only the sex but the age and date of burial of the remains.

It was the proportion of females to males that most impacted researchers. In today’s society where North American women still experience the resistance of the glass ceiling and many women internationally are simply fighting for autonomy and the right to vote, researchers were impressed by the clear acceptance of women in positions of power. Only the most influential members of society would be buried in such an important spiritual place, so this is a clear indication of a gender-equal society a full five thousand years ago.

In many modern depictions of Stonehenge’s history, ritual and rite are only conducted for men and by men, but science shows that Stone Age society was perhaps more advanced than we previously believed. Sometimes it’s good to look to the past to inform our modern lives, and this might be a good example of when lessons can be learned from those who have gone before us.

Photo credit: Peter Trimming and Wikimedia Commons

It’s Cover Reveal Time!!

Having a new book release is fun, but it’s fun in stages: The satisfaction of typing ‘The End’ on the first draft. The joy of signing a contract (after all the uncertainly of drafting and convincing yourself that the whole story is garbage, it’s like that moment when Sally Field won the Oscar for Places in the Heart.)

via GIPHY

Holding an advance copy in your hands for the first time, and likewise the final copy. Seeing your book on bookstore shelves. All that hard work, finally realized.

Part of this process is getting the cover. It lands in your inbox and you have a brief moment of ‘what if I don’t love it?’. You open the image peeking through your fingers. And then you realize that people more talented than you, people who really know what they are doing, are on your side and they’ve made something fantastic for you.

That’s how we felt we received the cover for LONE WOLF, the first book in the new FBI K-9 thriller series we're writing as Sara Driscoll. And we’re thrilled that we can finally show it off. We can’t wait to see this on shelves in December!

When a madman goes on a bombing spree, an FBI K-9 team of one woman and her dog is the key to stopping him before more innocents die and panic sweeps the Eastern seaboard.

Meg Jennings and her Labrador, Hawk, are one of the FBI’s top K-9 teams certified for tracking and search and rescue. When a bomb rips apart a government building on the National Mall in Washington D.C., it will take all the team’s skill to locate and save the workers and children buried beneath the rubble.

More victims die and fear rises as the unseen bomber continues his reign of terror, striking additional targets, ruthlessly bent on pursuing a personal agenda of retribution. Meg and Hawk join the task force dedicated to following the trail of death and destruction to stop the killer. But when the attacks spiral wide and no single location seems safe any longer, it will come down to a battle of wits and survival skills between Meg, Hawk, and the bomber they’re tracking. Can they stop him before he brings the nation to the brink of chaos?

Isn’t that eye-catching and atmospheric? We love that Hawk is right out front because we have no story without him.

Hit the comments and let us know what you think!

Zika: Emergence of a New Epidemic

Electron micrograph of Zika virus particles.

You’d have to be living under a rock for the last few weeks to have missed the fact that a new virus—called Zika—has been making headlines. In reality, Zika is not a new virus at all, however its effects in the last six months in Brazil and other south American countries has been utterly alarming. Worst, one of its most terrible of its outcomes strikes the most fragile of us—unborn infants.

The Zika virus was discovered in 1947 in the Zika Forest in Uganda. It is one of a number of viruses in the Flaviviridae family which includes dengue virus and West Nile virus. By far, the main method of transmission is via the mosquito Aedes aegypti, therefore the areas of mosquito-borne Zika infection follow the natural distribution of Aedes aegypti in an equatorial band around the planet. Historically, disease caused by Zika has been considered mild and mostly trivial with four out of five infected people never knowing they were ever infected. Those who develop symptoms usually present with a low grade fever, joint and muscle pain, and headaches lasting from approximately two to seven days. Since there is no effective medicine or vaccine, symptoms are treated directly—rest, plenty of fluids, and acetominophen to ease the aches and pains. For most patients that is sufficient, and severe disease and death were extremely rare.

However, a disturbing picture emerged from Brazil last November when the news broke that 4,000 babies had been born in 2015 with microcephaly—a birth defect in newborns with abnormally small heads and incomplete brain development. Compared to the normal average of 150 babies born with microcephaly in a single year, this is a staggering increase. While we’re still waiting for definitive evidence that this increase is due to the Zika virus, Zika was first identified in the country in May of 2015, and some pregnant women at the time showed evidence of the virus’ RNA genome, leading public health officials to infer that Zika was responsible. Late last week, Columbia reported three people who died of Guillain-Barré syndrome—a disorder where the body’s immune system attacks the peripheral nerves causing muscle weakness and paralysis—following Zika infection.

Recently, the World Health Organization took the significant step of defining Zika as a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’. However, it is difficult to make recommendations about Zika since the virus is not well studied. Less than 200 scientific papers mention Zika, only a handful of which are notable for significant information. And the fact that so much is still unknown—all methods of transmission, life cycle of the virus, where it replicates inside the body, and what body fluids it can be found in and for how long—ties the hands of public health officials who are trying their best to prepare people on how best to protect themselves. The virus has been found in saliva, blood, semen, and urine, leading to warnings about sexual transmission, pregnant woman kissing anyone other than their partner, and to blood banks setting restrictions on blood donations in a window following travel to Zika-ravaged countries. Some countries, like El Salvador, have even suggested to women that they refrain from getting pregnant for the next two years, a difficult issue in a Catholic country where most methods of birth control are forbidden. At this point, the main preventative strategy is to avoid travel in the twenty-six countries with documented Zika infections. If not, avoidance of mosquito bites is the next best thing, by using bug spray, wearing long sleeves and pants to cover the skin, and sleeping in rooms with window screens or air-conditioning.

This story has struck a personal note in my day job as a manager of an infectious diseases lab. Flaviviruses are one of our main areas of study, with past projects including major NIH studies of both West Nile and dengue fever. In fact, dengue virus is carried by the same mosquito as Zika, opening up the possibility of co-infection or super infection (infection of a second virus following infection of the first). While the West Nile study was of North American cases, the more recent dengue fever study involved cases and controls from Central and South America and southeast Asia. Currently, we’re looking at the tens of thousands of samples in our freezers from that study and wondering how many of them might also contain Zika. Discussions are already well under way and we hope to join the fight against Zika very soon. We’re certainly better situated to hit the ground running than most labs considering our existing sample bank, and we have high hopes that we can make a meaningful contribution.

So where do we go from here? First and foremost, remember all the public health agencies are doing their best to keep people safe. It’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation—people will be upset if recommended precautions seem too severe, or if they turn out to be too lax as additional information is discovered.  They’re doing their very best based on extremely limited information. And while for the majority of people, Zika is not likely to be a major health concern, for the sake of those that are more significantly affected, it behooves us all to be diligent to protect the vulnerable.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Debunking JFK’s Single Shooter Theory?

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, as he rode in a motorcade on the way to a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart where he was to meet with the city’s top leaders and businessmen. In 1963, the science of forensics was in its infancy. There was incredible outside pressure upon law enforcement to identify and apprehend the guilty party, giving a grieving country closure and hopefully allowing it to move on with Lyndon B. Johnson at the helm. Lee Harvey Oswald seemed to fit the bill as the perpetrator of the horrific crime, only his shooting by Jack Ruby closed the case with even more speed than investigators ever anticipated.

There have been multiple investigations of the JFK assassination. The first was the Warren Commission, meeting from December 1963 to September 1964, which concluded that Oswald had acted alone. From this investigation, the ‘Single Bullet’ theory (named the ‘Magic Bullet’ theory by critics) was proposed: a single bullet, fired from Oswald’s rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, struck President Kennedy in the back before passing through his neck to then strike Texas Governor Connally in the back, shattering his fifth rib before passing through his right wrist to finally lodge in his left thigh. Early critical analysis rejected this theory, stating that the bullet would have to change direction in mid-air several times to fit the documented injuries. However, current forensics and materials knowledge has confirmed that with a slight change in position of the two victims, a single bullet could realistically explain the pattern of injury. However, Kennedy would have survived that shot. But a second bullet struck the back of Kennedy’s head, shattering the skull and fragmenting inside the brain, leaving him immediately brain dead and clinically dead within thirty minutes.

Despite the Warren Commission decision, theories of a second gunman on the grassy knoll persisted. In 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations ruled that JFK and Governor Connally’s injuries were caused only by Oswald’s two shots, however audio analysis indicated there could have been a second shooter, fanning the flames of conspiracy theorists who insisted that Oswald hadn’t acted alone.

Five bullet fragments were recovered during the original investigation and were analysed to determine if they might have come from more than the two bullets that struck the President. In 1978, radiochemist Dr. Vincent P. Guinn was allowed to test the fragments using Neutron Activation Analysis—a procedure to test trace elements in a material without destroying the sample. From the analysis of the trace elements antimony, arsenic, copper, and silver, Guinn determined that all the fragments came from the same two bullets with an identical composition.

Dr. Clifford Spiegelman of Texas A&M University used modern statistical techniques to re-examine those same five bullet fragments. And his findings directly contradicted those of Dr. Guinn. As Dr. Spiegelman explains, there were several significant problems with Guinn’s analysis. The first was the belief that a single chemical test, as opposed to a multi-disciplinary analysis, would be sufficient to yield reliable results. The second problem was the assumption that trace elements during single manufacturing run of the material would be consistent throughout the production line. 

Idealized element composition during manufacturing.

In terms of ammunition, Dr. Guinn and the FBI assumed that bullets with the same composition would have come from the same box. Instead, Dr. Spiegelman found the actual production of the sample was anything but consistent:

Actual antimony sampling during multiple bullet production runs.

This means that the original hypothesis behind the chemical analysis of the JFK assassination bullet was fundamentally flawed. To demonstrate this, the team from A&M analyzed thirty bullets to determine their trace element profile. Of the thirty, one of the modern bullets actually matched the profile of the JFK bullet fragments, further proving how a simple chemical analysis is insufficient to prove a chemical profile so unique to confirm it could be the only bullet involved in an assassination.

Dr. Spiegelman is adamant that this does not mean there was a second shooter in Dealey Plaza. But he does insist Dr. Guinn’s original assessment that there were only two bullets and they came from the same box of bullets and the same rifle has to now be considered totally inconclusive.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons and Dr. Clifford Spiegelman, Texas A&M University