A twelve year old cat with two faces

September 28, 2011 • 1:01 pm

This is bizarre, but of course I’m compelled to post it.  There is a cat in Massachusetts that has two faces and two names: Frank and Louie. He (they?) has a congenital condition, craniofacial duplication that has caused part of his face to be present in in multiple copies: F&L has three eyes (only two of which can see), two mouths, two noses, but only one esophagus and brain. According to Reuters, such “Janus cats” usually live only four days on average, but F&L is 12.  And according to the Guinness Book of World Records, Frank and Louie is the world’s oldest two-faced cat.

“When he was first born, every day was a blessing,” Marty told a local radio station on Tuesday.

She immediately adopted Frank and Louie. The cat has one brain so both faces act in unison. Two of his eyes — the outermost ones — are normal, while the middle eye is larger but doesn’t function.

The cat eats on the right side, using Frank’s face, which is connected to his esophagus, while Louie’s nose twitches at the same time, his owner said.

Marty told the local radio station that the cat is more like a dog because it walks on a leash and loves car rides.”

And oh hai, there’s a video; do watch it because it’s sort of heartwarming and not traumatizing at all:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1004415&w=425&h=350&fv=videoId%3D1183512676001%26playerID%3D8583326001%26playerKey%3DAQ%7E%7E%2CAAAAAE-vADk%7E%2CvuSqBN3kbUe3u9TlDxXq61TKsCCyYXYv%26domain%3Dembed%26dynamicStreaming%3Dtrue]

The condition, called diprosopus, is also seen in humans (I’ll mercifully spare you the photos), and is apparently caused by an overexpression of the sonic hedgehog gene, an important control gene in patterning many parts of the body. The protein is involved in widening the face, and when present in larger-than-normal quantities can widen one face into two.

h/t:  Llwddythlw

Victor Stenger on speedy neutrinos: did we cause God?

September 28, 2011 • 10:31 am

Over at Puffho, Victor Stenger ponders the evidence for faster-than-light neutrinos in a nice piece called “No cause to dispute Einstein.”  Many of us know Victor as an eloquent atheist/physicist, but he also informs us us that he worked for thirty years on neutrinos. Clearly, he’s eminently qualified to pronounce on the CERN experiments suggesting that those particles can move faster than light.

Stenger makes two points.  First, like many physicists he’s wary of the results, mainly because they’re contradicted by earlier data on supernovas:

However, a big fly in the ointment is the supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which sits just outside our galaxy 168,000 light-years from Earth. It was first seen by the naked eye on February 24, 1987. Three hours before the visible light reached Earth, a handful of neutrinos were detected in three independent underground detectors. If the CERN result is correct, they should have arrived in 1982. So, if I were a wagering man, I would bet the effect will go away because of some systematic error no one has yet been able to think of.

However, if particles can move faster than light, then there’s an astounding conclusion: effects can precede causes.

. . . superluminal [faster-than-light] motion in no way contradicts Einstein’s theory of special relativity published in 1905. Einstein’s equations fully allow for particles to travel faster than light — provided they never travel slower. Physicists have speculated about such objects for years. They are called tachyons. Many searches have been conducted, with no significant signals until now.

Einstein showed that it was impossible to accelerate a particle moving less than the speed of light (in a vacuum) to the speed of light or higher. Similarly, a tachyon cannot be decelerated to or below the speed of light. Only massless particles, such as photons, travel at exactly the speed of light.

However, there is a problem with tachyons. They imply that cause and effect are interchangeable. Consider the famous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton on July 11, 1804. An observer moving by at less than the speed of light with respect to the participants would have seen the bullet from Burr’s gun enter Hamilton’s lower abdomen. However, another observer moving faster than light would have seen the bullet emerge from Hamilton’s abdomen and enter Burr’s gun. Did Burr kill Hamilton or did Hamilton kill Burr? [jac note: I don’t understand the last sentence since in no frame of reference did Burr die. But the point is clear.]

Stenger says—and I did not know this—that the principle that causes must precede effects was an add-on that Einstein made to his theory of special relativity; it was not a consequence of his theory itself.  And if particles can move faster than light, then our whole notion of cause and effect is inverted.  This complete reversibility of time, and hence of cause and effect, is inherent in the Feynman diagrams of particle-particle interactions.

As a card-carrying New Atheist, and author of several good books on atheism, Stenger can’t resist using this possibility to get a little dig in at the faithful:

So, if confirmed, the reported result from CERN or any future observation of superluminal motion will not lead to the overthrow of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Its significance will be to overthrow the distinction between cause and effect. At the worst, Einstein might be faulted for taking causality a little too seriously.

Finally, you might want to ponder what effect the demise of causality would have on the notion of God as the ultimate cause of all there is.

___________

Over at the Guardian’s science section, Alom Shaha points out why the “Faster than light story highlights the difference between science and religion.” It’s all about doubt, replication, and hesitancy, of course:

 But the recent fuss over the possible existence of faster-than-light neutrinos illustrates precisely how different science and religion are when it comes to questions of “belief” or “knowledge”. . .

One of the things that appeals to me about science is that, unlike religion, science is not dogmatic. It does not say: “This is the way things are, and it can be no other way.” Instead it says something like: “Based on the evidence we have so far, this is how things probably are; if clear and solid evidence is discovered that shows this is not how things are, then we will need to change our minds.”

Science can seem rather weak in comparison to the certainties religion offers. But it is this very “weakness”, this refusal to issue absolute statements of truth, that allows science to progress, and to come up with increasingly better ways of explaining the world.

It’s the usual stuff, but the public can’t hear this too often.  Religion not only offers no certainties, but offers no knowledge, either.

h/t:  Luke

Aurora!

September 28, 2011 • 6:41 am

When I was younger, I made a bucket list of four things I wanted to see before I turned into worm food.  They were the Taj Mahal, Mount Everest, Machu Picchu, and the northern lights.  I’ve now seen the first three, but not yet the last.

But I can do it vicariously: from EarthObservatory comes this stunning photograph of the aurora australis, the southern lights, taken only a few days ago (Sept. 17) from the International Space Station. It was taken between Madagascar and northern Australia, and you can see the station’s solar panels.

Be sure to click to enlarge:

If you want even more of a stunner—a video of the lights moving and flickering—be sure to watch either the high-resolution movie or the low-resolution movie appearing on the site, which compresses 23 minutes of time-lapse photos into a 35-second movie.  At the end of the movie you can see a bunch of wildfires and human-set fires in Australia.

And here’s how auroras are produced (also from the site):

In this case, the space around Earth was stirred up by an explosion of hot, ionized gas from the Sun—a coronal mass ejection—that left the Sun on September 14, 2011.

The pressure and magnetic energy of the solar plasma stretches and twists the magnetic field of Earth like rubber bands, particularly in the tail on the night side. This energizes the particles trapped in our magnetic field; that energy is released suddenly as the field lines snap the particles down the field lines toward the north and south magnetic poles.

Fast-moving electrons collide with Earth’s upper atmosphere, transferring their energy to oxygen and nitrogen molecules and making them chemically “excited.” As the gases return to their normal state, they emit photons, small bursts of energy in the form of light. The color of light reflects the type of molecules releasing it; oxygen molecules and atoms tend to glow green, white or red, while nitrogen tends to be blue or purple. This ghostly light originates at altitudes of 100 to 400 kilometers (60 to 250 miles).

h/t: Diane G.

Triple play

September 28, 2011 • 6:38 am

I’ve seen a few of these live in my time, and I always love them.  This is the 5-4-3 variety (third base to second to first), made by Tampa Bay in their 5-3 victory over the Yankees yesterday.  I played second base in Little League, but the skill of the pros—their ability to field and then fire accurately to a distant glove—always awes me.

Scientists battle malaria using toxic nectar

September 28, 2011 • 4:26 am

Yesterday’s New York Times reports a series of studies, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aimed at eradicating malaria (one report has appeared in Malaria Journal; the reference is given below and you can download the paper by clicking the link at the NYT).

The idea is a clever one: female mosquitoes, who are the carriers of malaria (females need a blood meal before laying eggs), also dine, between bites, on nectar or fermenting fruit. Scientists were able to kill more than 90% of mosquitoes in tests in Africa simply by spraying trees with “poison nectar”: a mixture of sweetened water and an insecticide derived from bacteria. (The insecticide is Spinosad, which has the advantage that, because it must be ingested to kill, it’s harmless to humans and many other insects.)  Artificial baits containing poison and sweet liquid were also effective.

The researchers note two problems, but are missing one:

 Two more concepts still need to be tested, experts said.

Although it clearly works in arid areas where there are few trees or flowers, will it work in jungles, forests or farms where there are many competing sources of nectar?

And how often does spraying have to take place? The inventors hope as seldom as once a month will do the job.

Yes, but they’ve also forgotten about natural selection, for those mosquitoes that aren’t killed by Spinosad will be the ones who produce offspring, so we might expect mosquitoes to evolve resistance to the poison. This, of course, happened with mosquitoes and DDT in many parts of the world.

This might not happen, however, with an alternative poison that they’re using: boric acid.

“You can buy it by the truckload,” Dr. Christensen said. “And it kills in so many ways that there’s never been resistance to it. Some authorities think there never will be.”

Boric acid, which is often used to control cockroaches, is considered nontoxic to humans, but in insects acts both as a stomach poison and a cuticle abrasive, causing death by starvation or dehydration.

Frankly, I’m surprised that roaches haven’t evolved resistance to boric acid, for if there’s any rule in controlling pests and bacteria, it’s that there’s almost always genetic variation in a pest that enables it to respond to a novel selection pressure, so our counter-pest measures are temporary at best.  Nature is cleverer than we are, and we simply can’t predict the multifarious ways that insects can respond to insecticides, bacteria to antibiotics, or weeds to herbicides.

And genetic variation is pervasive: I’m aware of only a handful of selection experiments in Drosophila, for example, that haven’t produced a response (two of the three “failed” studies were done by me, and those involved selection for directional asymmetry, for example, flies whose left eyes were bigger than their right, or vice versa).

_________________

Müller, G. C. et al., 2010. Successful field trial of attractive toxic sugar bait (ATSB) plant-spraying methods against malaria vectors in the Anopheles gambiae complex in Mali, West Africa.  Malaria Journal, 9:1-7

Atheists invade Hartford

September 27, 2011 • 10:48 am

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is having its annual convention in Hartford, Connecticut from October 7-9.  I’m going (and giving a talk), and there’s a really nice lineup of speakers and events, including Steve Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein speaking about their new books.

Susan Campbell at The Hartford Courant reports that the FFRF has put up two awesome billboards off the main highway, both featuring famous residents:

In preparation for their Oct. 7-9 convention in Connecticut’s capital city, the Wisconsin-based freethinkers’ organization just put billboards up in Hartford (just off I-91 and I-84) that answer that.

Hartford was chosen in no small part because members wanted to tour  [Mark] Twain’s home, says Dan Barker, co-president of the foundation, and a former evangelical minister. Twain was a notorious agnostic — or perhaps an atheist.

And Katharine Hepburn