Meet Frank and Louie, the two-faced cat. Kitties like this are often called Janus cats, after the Roman two-faced god. These kitties often don’t live very long after birth or are euthanized. This guy has lived to the ripe old age of twelve, and in September 2011 entered the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest surviving Janus cat. (I’m referring to him in the singular because his owner does; she gave him two names, but after twelve years she seems confident that he is one cat with two faces rather than two cats on one body, and he does have only one brain so it’s likely that he has one consciousness.)

Frank and Louie’s condition is called diprosopus, or craniofacial duplication. He is not a pair of conjoined twins. In conjoined twinning, a developing embryo splits partially and becomes a pair of twins who remain connected to each other. (If they split completely in two, they would develop independently as identical twins.) In diprosopus, a single embryo simply grows duplicated body parts, due to an excess of a particular morphogen protein (whimsically named sonic hedgehog homolog or SHH for short) that controls cell division and organ formation.

Fortunately Frank and Louie doesn’t have any life-threatening physiological differences. Only one of his mouths connects to his esophagus. He has no trouble eating or breathing. Sometimes this condition can be dangerous, as in the case of a human baby with craniofacial duplication; Lali had a cleft palate which made it difficult for her to suck milk, and due to a lack of proper care she died at the age of two months.

I Can Has Cheezburger, among many other pop culture sites, posted about Frank and Louie because of his Guinness Book induction. Unlike other sites, they chose to hide his pictures behind a link, so that readers had to click to see him. You could read about him before clicking, but in order to see him you had to click through, because the editors thought the images might be disturbing. I know the site is dedicated to the pursuit of cute, but isn’t that going a little too far? I’ll decide for myself who I think is cute, thank you very much. (And I’ve never seen a cat that I thought was ugly.)

I’ve been reading Frankenstein and I was bothered by the idea that humans are flat-out unable to overcome their disgust for a person who looks different. Then I watched The Fantastic Four, in which Ben Grimm’s mutation makes everybody (including his wife) treat him like garbage. Then Cheezburger decided that I needed to be protected from the sight of this cat.

Of course, the human sense of disgust at people who are radically different from the norm is an evolved trait; it prevented severe disabilities from being propagated in the gene pool. But the result is that a person who deserves to be treated like a person will be treated like a freak by most people. It’s time for humans to buck up and consciously overcome this evolved trait, and learn to deal with people who have physical differences in a polite and humane way. They don’t need to have bags over their heads until someone else decides they’re ready for the sight.

Since this is a science blog, it’s likely that I’m going to post pictures of people and animals whose physical differences have made the news. I’m not going to warn about them. I might warn if I’m posting pictures of dead or injured people and animals (if you search the web for diprosopus and related conditions you will see lots of pictures of dead babies) but that’s it.

If you can’t handle it, don’t click the links I post, or don’t read this blog at all because if I can post pictures I probably will. But I would strongly recommend learning to handle it, simply for the sake of common decency. Kthx bai!

LINKS: more cats with facial differences.
Charlie, the cat who looks like Lord Voldemort. Yay, he’s been adopted!
Chase No-Face, who survived a nasty accident but has some bits missing. And she is also very happy.

Sound familiar? Facilitated communication is essentially using a human being as a Ouija board. The most disturbing thing is not that facilitators give false hope to parents of nonverbal children, or that they make money by writing books that they claim are written by their patients; it’s that they are taking advantage of people with disabilities and putting words in their mouths that are not theirs. What a way to obscure the fact that these people can’t communicate (or at least can’t be understood). If it’s this easy, it can be done with any nonverbal person! Autistic people, coma patients, people who are, uh, asleep…

The longer this is taken seriously, the less people will pay attention to the real concerns, needs, and rights of people whose disabilities prevent them from communicating.

Here’s a smaller-scale impact. It’s not news, but it’s worth reminding folks of what happens if you tell Buzz Aldrin that he never walked on the Moon.

And if all the Apollo anniversary excitement wasn’t enough for you, there will be a total solar eclipse in a few hours.

It’ll be happening on the morning of the 22nd for those in the same time zones as totality (which will pass through India, China, and points between, and then out into the Pacific). For western Europe it’ll be starting around midnightish, and for the Americas it starts early this evening.

Here are a few sites that will be showing live webcasts. The best time to tune in and catch the start of totality, since these are from east Asia, will be around 01:30 UT. (Convert to your local time here so you know when to log in.)

http://sems1.cs.und.edu/~sems/index.php (from Wuhan, China)
http://www.atlaspost.com/2009tse (from mainland China)
http://www.live-eclipse.org/ (from Kyushu Island, Japan)

The scientific community was not overly resistant to Galileo’s ideas. It was the church that persecuted Galileo for his ideas about a heliocentric solar system, who had him tried for heresy, forced him to recant his position, put him under house arrest for the rest of his life, and didn’t forgive him until almost four hundred years later. When religion and state are as tightly welded together as they were in Galileo’s Italy, ideas that contradict religion can be treated as crimes.

The scientific community, on the other hand, wasn’t bothered. While Galileo was the first to observe direct evidence of objects orbiting something other than the Earth (specifically, four little moons orbiting Jupiter), he was not the first to come up with the idea of the Sun at the centre of the solar system.  Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric model in 1543, and Johannes Kepler formulated his laws of planetary motion (which rely on a heliocentric view) in 1605 — both prior to Galileo’s first look at Jupiter’s moons through a telescope in 1610. By the 1670s, Isaac Newton was working on a theory of gravity that could explain the motions of heavenly bodies, and which took heliocentrism for granted in order to do so.

In other words, the idea was already out there by the time Galileo started his work on it, and the only entity actively trying to stop Galileo’s work from spreading was the Vatican — not some vast worldwide conspiracy of cliquey scientists.

For that matter, information did not travel fast enough for any resistance or lack thereof to be universally agreed upon by scientists everywhere — it’s probably safe to say that there was not a worldwide scientific community at the time at all. If it took sixty years between Galileo’s discovery and other scientists (like Newton) accepting heliocentrism with open arms, that’s not long at all (considering how slowly information travelled in those times). But it didn’t take that long, because the idea already existed and was being used even before Galileo came onto the scene.

There are more bad ideas than there are good ones. There have been good ideas that genuinely met with resistance from the scientific community and were proven later on to have merit. Evolution and plate tectonics come to mind, or the idea that animals have conscious thought and emotion. The reasons for the resistance are many — perhaps people weren’t convinced by the evidence at hand, or perhaps cultural bias had a hand in it (scientists are people, after all, raised in human cultures). Maybe science would be more advanced in some areas today if these ideas had been accepted sooner than they were.

On the other hand, there are far more bad ideas out there — hypotheses that are not supported by good evidence or predicted by solid theory — than there are good ones that are not getting taken as seriously as they should. If we’re overly accepting of new ideas, a lot of bad ideas would be taken more seriously than they deserve.

The goal of science is to create the most accurate picture of the world that we can. If you have two hypotheses to choose from, you choose the one that is backed up by more evidence, and make that your working model. (If you choose the weaker one, your working model is going to lead you in the wrong direction because you’re building your own ideas on a shaky foundation.) It’s a slow process, but it moves forward as every generation of scientists discovers new things and makes little tweaks and edits to old ideas — as long as said scientists are rigorous about choosing the right foundations for their work.

The next time someone tells you “they laughed at Galileo”, tell them to give Galileo’s contemporary scientists more respect. They weren’t as short-sighted as some people would have us believe.

2. Why the heck do people (or other mammals, for that matter) have hymens? What kind of evolutionary advantage is that? Is it vestigial in humans, seeing as some women are born without one and there are lots of physical variations?

Robert Elwood, the lead author of both papers, explained to Discovery News that pain allows an individual to be “aware of the potential tissue damage” while experiencing “a huge negative emotion or motivation that it learns to avoid that situation in the future.”

Part of me wants to say “well, duh.”

The crabs observed in the experiment not only responded to pain by leaving the situation in which they were being hurt, but also behaved in ways similar to what many other animals do when in pain — grooming, stress-related fidgeting, and protective behaviours such as limping.

Is this an experiment that needed to be done, and will the results change the way people treat invertebrates? Or was it an unnecessarily cruel thing to do to a bunch of hermit crabs for the sake of an obvious result?

Given the number of people who do believe that these animals don’t feel pain, arguably because it’s a “nice” thing to believe when you like to eat a type of critter that is traditionally boiled alive, maybe a scientific result is needed to shake things up a bit and make people question commonly-held beliefs.

The next question might be: are there any members of the animal kingdom who don’t feel pain, who would not benefit from it as a sign of danger because they aren’t capable of evasive or defensive action?

I was listening to a radio documentary (I think it was called “Ocean Mind”) on CBC Radio late last night, about how dolphins and whales perceive their world. Among other things, it talked about how echolocation (or sonar) may provide levels of social intimacy well outside the range of human experience.

One way is that since sound waves can travel through flesh, dolphins can see inside each other’s bodies. Another is that dolphins can intercept each other’s echoes, and effectively “see” what someone else is looking at.

Can unborn dolphins pick up on returning clicks that their mothers send out, and can they “see” the world around them from long before they’re born (or at least as long as they have sufficiently developed organs to detect the sound)? Would it be nonsensical without any other senses for frame of reference?

For that matter, how much learning or brain pathway development can a human fetus do before it’s born, when it can hear things from outside its mother’s body? As far as I know, babies who are born deaf don’t seem to have suffered intellectually from not having been able to hear before they were born.

When I went to university, there were female professors in our physics department, but the biggest science outreach effort centred on the campus observatory. When I was in my first year, most of the observatory staff (with the exception of our supervising professor and a couple of fourth-year students) was female.

Every week there would be public nights in the observatory, and private group tours for school classes, Brownies and Girl Guides. The women that I worked with in the observatory — Monika and Julie a year ahead of me, and Annska and Melissa in my class, and Sandy and Sarah a year behind — were a big inspiration to me both as a science student and as a wanna-be educator, and I could tell that the little girls looked up to them.

But the importance of what they did — standing there with the telescope, operating it in plain view, chatting with the kids while helping them up to look through the eyepiece — didn’t really hit home until one day when two preteen girls in a subway station yelled hello and waved at me. I didn’t recognize their faces (observatories tend to be dark!) but I waved back.

It’s only now that I can say in words why that was important. Traditionally, teachers and professors and such are seen as high above their students, to the point of being somehow apart from humanity, someone whose presence one can’t relax in. (Admit it, you’ve been weirded out by the thought of one of your profs going on a date or visiting family or something.) But the telescope operators and tour guides were scientists that people could feel familiar with. They were smart, but also normal and fun enough that preteen kids would wave to them on a subway platform. I felt like we were making science more accessible to these girls just by being accessible and approachable ourselves.

Amateur astronomers are also a fun bunch. These are people who do science just because they like it, not because they get paid. Some of them have post-secondary educations in astronomy or related fields; some studied other sciences or the arts. Some of them spend small fortunes on home observatories, some have more modest rigs that they can take out to dark-sky sites and parks, and others don’t rely on any equipment other than their own eyes and brain and maybe binoculars.

What they all have in common is that they love science and they love learning, and the vast majority of them seem to be very keen on knowing the difference between real science and pseudoscience. And a lot of them love to teach. Among the general public, the ones who need science education the most are the ones who haven’t had much science education yet. They don’t need a professor with ten years of degrees, they just need someone who can explain the basics and keep them from being bored.

My classmates at university were not the first women I ever met who were good at this. As a teenager I joined the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada after getting a brochure from them at a science fair. Despite the high-falutin’ name, this national organization consists of many amateur astronomers as well as professionals, and at ground level you’ll find lots of both groups eager to share their love of science. Through the RASC I’ve met women like Peggy and Kim and Katrina out on sidewalks with their telescopes to show people the sights, and Leslie with her carful of classroom materials that she takes to schools and clubs all over her city, and science museum gurus Sara and Kirsten, and Carolyn who has discovered more comets than any other human being.

I can’t name all of them, and I apologize to anyone I’ve left out. But if you’re looking for inspiration on how average people can do real science, or if you want to take your little girl to meet some approachable and smart and inspiring women, an astronomy club is the place to look.

You can read more blog posts about female scientists at the Ada Lovelace Day Mashup.

I’ve never seen plants having sex! In biology jargon, sexual reproduction simply means that two parents combine their genes to make offspring. As mammals, we associate the word with physical arousal, warm snuggly feelings and undignified athletics, but other life forms have different ways of sharing their genetic material.

Where does a plant keep its naughty bits? Most of the plants in your garden are probably flowering plants, and the flower is the reproductive system. Remember that the next time you stick your nose in one.

How do you tell a girl plant from a boy plant? The most useful question to ask is whether a given plant has male parts (that produce pollen, a.k.a. sperm), female parts (ovaries that produce and protect ova), or both. For some plants, each individual has only male flowers or only female flowers. For others, each individual plant has some flowers with male parts and some with female parts. The most common arrangement in your garden is for every plant to have both male and female parts on every flower.

So how do they, uh, “do it”? There’s usually a third party involved. (Oo-er, missus.) An insect or a bird or a bat visits a flower and inadvertently gets pollen stuck to its body, which gets transferred to the next flower visted. Critters visit because the plant offers them food (usually a sugary liquid called nectar, which they can get to without damaging the flower). They know the food is there because of the pretty colours and nice smells that are the flower’s way of advertising its presence. A flower without food to offer to a pollinator, and without a way of letting the pollinators know where it is, would have a slim chance of reproducing. That said, there are ways around this problem. A pine tree’s male flowers are inconspicuous little spikes that don’t rely on animal pollinators — they just let their pollen blow away in the wind to land on the female flowers (also known as cones) of other pine trees. (Think about that the next time you see that powdery yellow pine pollen all over everything!) Some flowers’ pollen can actually fertilize the ova in the same flower, so it doesn’t even need to travel.

I’ve never seen a pregnant plant, either. Actually, you have — if you’ve seen fruit hanging from a tree, you’ve seen a pregnant plant. After the ovum is fertilized by the pollen, the petals of the flower drop off (they’re just advertising, so their work is done). Fruit grows out from the ovary, protecting the developing embryonic plant — i.e. the seed. Fruits can be anything from simple little nuts or pods to big extravagant juicy constructions, all evolved to protect, nourish, and/or transport the seed. The fruit of a maple tree is a papery little pod with a sail-like feature that helps it travel away from the tree when it falls. The fruit of a blueberry bush is a tasty little purple thing that lots of animals like to eat, and with luck the seeds will survive the trip through the animal’s digestive system and end up planted in a nice pile of poo somewhere far from the plant.

If you can think of anything that I’ve missed, leave a comment. I am happy to talk your ear off about plants.