'Two-faced' chimera cat Venus is an overnight internet sensation

Thousands have flocked to the unusual moggy's Facebook page which has received over 40,000 likes, while a video of the cute cat has racked up almost one million views on YouTube in just a matter of days.

The cats symmetrically divided black and ginger facial fur has been likened to a much cuter version of fictional comic book character, Batman's infamous adversary Two-Face.

Venus may look like she comes from another planet but her striking appearance and opposing coloured eyes have a far more ordinary explanation - genetic mutation.

'We've heard everything from Photoshop to we've dyed half of her face,' her owner Christina, from North Carolina, told the Today Show. 'This is just the way she was born, that's it.'

Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/910278-two-faced-chimera-cat-venus-is-an-overnight-internet-sensation#ixzz25ZLrDD69

A rare he-she butterfly is born in London's NHM

A half-male, half-female butterfly has hatched at London's Natural History Museum.

A line down the insect's middle marks the division between its male side and its more colourful female side.

Failure of the butterfly's sex chromosomes to separate during fertilisation is behind this rare sexual chimera.

Once it has lived out its month-long life, the butterfly will join the museum's collection.

Only 0.01% of hatching butterflies are gynandromorphs; the technical term for these strange asymmetrical creatures.

"So you can understand why I was bouncing off of the walls when I learned that... [it] had emerged in the puparium," said butterfly enthusiast Luke Brown from London's Natural History Museum.

Mr Brown built his first butterfly house when he was seven, and has hatched out over 300 thousand butterflies; this is only his third gynandromorph.

Half and half
It is not only the wings that are affected, he explained. The butterfly's body is split in two, its sexual organs are half and half, and even its antennae are different lengths.

"It is a complete split; part-male, part-female... welded together inside," he told the BBC.

The dual-sex butterfly is an example of a Great Mormon, Papilio memnon - a species that is native to Asia.

With a shortage of butterfly-specific gender neutral pronouns, the butterfly is being referred to as "it", and is already middle-aged at three and a half week's old.

So the public has only a narrow window of opportunity to see it alive.

Though rare, gynandromorphy isn't unique to butterflies; individual crabs, lobsters, spiders and chickens have all been found with a mix of two sexes.

There are likely many more cases in the natural world, but sexual chimeras are more difficult to spot in animals where females and males look alike.



By Jennifer Carpenter

Science reporter, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14108204

Living, biological raygun produced in lab

Glowing mammal-jellyfish chimera-blob emits laser beam

By Lewis Page
Posted in Biology, 13th June 2011 11:52 GMT

Beings or creatures able to emit beams of focused energy from their own living bodies: fiction, right? Comic-book, X Men stuff, right?

Wrong. Boffins in America have announced that they have successfully produced laser light from living cells under laboratory conditions, paving the way - they say - for living lasers to be implanted or grown within human patients, or for the production of living machinery able to interface with optical communications networks.

"Since they were first developed some 50 years ago, lasers have used synthetic materials such as crystals, dyes and purified gases as optical gain media, within which photon pulses are amplified as they bounces back and forth between two mirrors," says Seok Hyun Yun, a top boffin from the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"Ours is the first report of a successful biological laser based on a single, living cell."

Yun and his colleague Malte Gather created their lasercyte by meddling with some unspecified mammal cells to make them produce suitable amounts of green fluorescent protein (GFP). GFP, originally discovered in jellyfish, does what it says on the tin - it emits light. In order to make this light coherent, the two boffins placed a lasercyte inside a tiny spherical device rigged with mirrors at the ends, as in a regular laser.

According to a statement issued by Massachusetts General:

Not only did the cell-based device produce pulses of laser light [but] the researchers also found that the spherical shape of the cell itself acted as a lens, refocusing the light and inducing emission of laser light at lower energy levels ... The cells used in the device survived the lasing process and were able to continue producing hundreds of pulses of laser light.

"The ability to generate laser light from a biocompatible source placed inside a patient could be useful," comments Yun, though at the moment he is thinking more of medical imaging and such like as opposed to the ability to emit deadly energy rays from one's eyes or similar.

Gather, on the other hand, is thinking more of making biological machinery that might one day let you plug an optical fibre straight into your brain, or similar.

"One of our long-term goals will be finding ways to bring optical communications and computing, currently done with inanimate electronic devices, into the realm of biotechnology," explains the scientist. "That could be particularly useful in projects requiring the interfacing of electronics with biological organisms."

Yun and Gather's study is published online by Nature Photonics. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/13/lasercyte/

The Olmec Dragon

Icon. Drawing Olmec: dragon carved in stone found
in Chalcatzingo (Photo: INAH)

Sunday, March 27, 2011

MEXICO – In Vera Cruz, Guerrero and Morelos (states of Mexico), archaeologists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found representations of mythical beings who were believed, until then, were ignored by the ancient dwellers of the region: dragons.

Images carved in stone, clay sculptures and paintings dating between the years 1200 and 400 BC indicate the practice of a cult of worship to this fantastic animal: the dragon Olmec. There is no mistake. This is not the plumed serpent known and called Quetzalcoatl or Kukulkan. It is another more ancient creature.

The olmec dragon is depicted as a chimera, mixing physical features of snake, bird and jaguar. It also appears like an anthropomorphic being, a dragon-man.

The images have peculiar traits of the Olmec culture: the flame-shaped eyebrows and a cross, of the type called cross of St. Andrew, located between the eyes or on the back. The chief of excavations at Chalcatzingo, in Morelos, Carolina Meza Rodriguez adds: Another interesting aspect of Olmec dragon is that his mouth emits signs that seem like combinations of commas. It is not known whether the signals represent mere fumes or they are words, names, belonging to an unknown language or writing.

The olmec dragons are always related to the cave entrances. It is speculated that they are the symbol of power of an ancient lineage of leaders who ruled the Olmec people between the years 800 and 500 BC. In some cases, the iconographic elements associated with the dragon are found in different parts of a cave. Thereby, the entire chamber becomes a dragon. The Olmec people is the oldest sedentary culture today known at Mesoamerica

SOURCE: CRUZ, Antimio. Los Olmecas también imaginaron dragones.
IN El Universal/Mexico, published in 03/27/2011
[http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/cultura/65110.html]

http://brazilweirdnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/olmec-dragon.html