A 2,700-year-old scent of aloe: chemists read a mummy's recipe for the first time

The mummified head had kept its secret for roughly 2,700 years. At Marburg University in Germany, an unlikely team — chemists, Egyptologists and historians of pharmacy — combined modern molecule-hunting with old written sources and found something no one had detected in embalming material before: compounds from aloe, the plant later famous as a medicine. Their analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also matched the head's chemistry to a separately catalogued powder in Heidelberg's German Pharmacy Museum, suggesting two museum objects, long filed apart, may share a history. Ancient recipes, it turns out, can still be read — if you bring enough kinds of expertise to the table.