The Wow! Signal

No I am not talking about world of warcraft.

The Wow! signal is a transmission picked up by the Big Ear radio telescope. The signal was so unusual it caused the researcher to write WOW! in the margin of the record, thus the name. The signal is possibly our best evidence of an artificial radio transmission from space. Even skeptical researchers have agreed that it is very unlikely to be reflected Earth based transmissions or an aberration in a natural continuous noise. What is even more bizarre is that the signal comes from the middle of no where in space. Meaning no planets, no solar system. Is this an SOS from an intergalactic titanic?

Now while the scientific skeptic in me wants to believe that this is probably caused by some unknown astrophysical phenomenon we have yet to discover, another part of me wonders if intelligent, signal producing life may not be the phenomenon we have yet to discover.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not a believer in ETs and Area 51 or abductions or anything like that. I don't believe that aliens are little green men among us and that Earth is such a damn interesting place that they keep wanting to come back and stick things in the anuses of people living in rural areas.

(courtesy of XKCD)

But who can say that in all the vastness of the universe we are the only life that decided to broadcast? I prefer to imagine that just maybe we are catching the very smallest sliver of some larger drama. Think of all of the stories we can't even imagine telling.

check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

Fun with Fistulation

So for my last class we were learning about ruminant nutrition. In an effort to show us how cattle select forage, our professor set up an exercise with some rumen-fistulated steers.

Ok, so here is how this works. The rumen is the large fermenting section of a cow's 4 chamber stomach. When the steer is fully grown, a veterinarian performs a surgery in which the rumen wall is stitched to the skin and left to heal. This leaves a 4 inch diameter hole directly into the animal's stomach. This is sealed with a plastic cap and the animal can go about their lives with no side effects.

We took 3 fistulated steers up to the Maxwell Research Ranch and let them acclimate for a few days before the study. The morning of the study, we rounded up the steers and got them locked into the chute so that we could handle them. We popped open the plastic caps on their stomachs and got scooping. We had to remove all of the solid matter by hand.
Here I am arm deep in the first steer.

There is a massive volume of material in the rumen. Each animal hadn't eaten since the night before and still had about 30 gallons of material in their rumens. Our professor considers cleaning out rumens to be a right of passage due to the paticular smell of partially fermented cow food. Its not like methane or cow shit as it hasn't been digested that far, but the microbes in the rumen are producing volatile fatty acids that do smell. This is the amount of material taken from one steer. The bubbles are the fermentation byproducts

After scooping out by hand as much as we could we had to use a shop vac to clean out their stomachs. That's right, we used a shop vac inside a live animal. Blew my mind.
Once the steer were empty, we let them back out to graze as they were suddenly very hungry. We had some students trying to clip forage samples similar to what the animals were consuming. After we let them graze for almost an hour we rounded them back up, put them in the shoot and opened their rumens again. We took samples of the recently consumed material, the partially digested material, and the rumen fluid and then put the entire trashcan of goop back in the animal.
The point of this whole exercise was to see what the animals were actually eating. While a .25 square meter plot of forage may have only 3-5% crude protein content, the cattle were able to pick the best parts and ended up with a dietary crude protein content as high as 8%. That pretty impressive considering they look like living lawnmowers.

Here are some of the better pictures from the day.

This guy was a kicker

Here is my prof vacuuming out the steer

Megan getting deep

Joel watching the cattle graze

It got a little messy...

A lovely yet chilly day on the ranch

This guy was my favorite. He let me pick burrs out of his coat.

Black hole

So overall it was a fun yet exhausting day. We returned to campus hopefully wiser, surely smellier.

Vet Stuff 1/11-1/18

So I am trying to keep a record of some of the more interesting cases I am involved with at the humane society so that I can hopefully include them in some amazing inspired personal statement later on this year.
So here are some of last weeks highlights:

• Stray cat was brought in by the animal control officers. We aren't sure whether the cat was hit by a car or attacked by an animal, but it was missing about 10 square inches of skin on its left hip and the whole area was infected. Despite being very hurt the cat was still kickin and was so aggressive we had to burrito it in a towel and use a mask to sedate him. Luckily the vet was able to get it all cleaned up and remove the dead tissue. Kitty is now healing and much less angry.
• We had a ferret in the clinic that was maced by police. Apparently the owner was resisting arrest and the police shot mace grenades in through the windows. They discovered the innocent ferret after arresting the man and took the poor animal to the vet school to be decontaminated. While the poor guy should have no lasting damage, he has lost almost all of the fur on the middle of his body and looks more like a fleshy tube sock at the moment.
• While working in the wildkind department, an officer brought in a raccoon that was found living in a backyard shed. The guy was apparently easy to catch, but once in the cage proceeded to freak out. He peeled up the metal bottom of the cage, so by the time we got him his hands were bleeding profusely. Bob, the head of wildkind was able to coax the raccoon into a larger cage to get a good look at him. This is the biggest raccoon I have ever seen. We usually work with babies and adolescents that are up to 20 lbs. This guy was probably >35lbs. He is also a little worse for wear. His left eye is milky and blind, his tail is missing and his teeth would make Austin Power's cringe. After doning shoulder length chain mail gloves and leather armored gauntlets, Bob grabs the guy out of the cage and wrestles him to the ground. He ends up having to sit on him and can barely control the head while another employee feels the furless patch between his shoulder blades. Unfortunately for old man raccoon it was covered in small scabby bumps. I learn that this is a sure sign that this raccoon has distemper. This deadly disease apparently causes self mutilation (there goes the tail), gingivitis (there go the teeth), and eventually death. It is highly contagious and very few animals survive. We unfortunately had to euthanize the hardy old bugger even though he looked like he may have been on the road to recovery as it would be impossible for us to re-release him knowing he had the disease. On a gruesome side note, Bob once saw a distemper raccoon chew off its own penis.
• Wildkind had another raccoon brought in that had been hit by a car. The adult male was lucky enough to not loose any limbs. Bob had done a good job of stabilizing him but he was still not eating well. The vet agreed to take a look at the guy's mouth. It took Bob and another vet tech to get the pre-surgery morphine shot into the guy, but 5 min later he looked very happy and very stoned. It was pretty easy getting him fully sedated and intubated. Turns out that the car had crushed all of his front teeth and they were now infected. The doc was able to get all of the infected teeth pulled and sewed the gums back together with dissolving sutures. The raccoon should have no problem in the future because the teeth most essential to eating (canines and molars) were thankfully intact. Last I heard, the raccoon was recovering well and eating again

Here are some pictures I took during the surgery

That is Bob in the blue scrub top


Well that's it for now. I am going to try and be disciplined and keep recording interesting cases.

Lady GayGay

Ok, I will admit I am a closeted Gaga fan. I am not saying she is the artist of our generation but she makes damn catchy songs.

Almost as catchy, is this remake of poker face by the westboro baptist church.
God Hates Fags and Lady Gaga. Seriously people with all of the terrible, corrupt things in the world you are protesting Lady Gaga?!?!

@LadyGaga "Poker Face" parody by WBC is done! Lyrics: http://tiny.cc/LGL2 Music: sound bite