Use of ‘thoracic stick’ in halal slaughter of bobby calves

Throat cutting associated with halal slaughter of bobby calves fails to sever the vertebral arteries supplying the brain. Such slaughter may be inhumane due to calves recovering from the stun before permanent insensibility, due to blood loss, occurs. Interruption of the vertebral arteries may be achieved by severance of the brachiocephalic trunk or penetration of the heart by the use of a ‘thoracic stick’, an incision with a knife through the thoracic inlet.     

The geological evolution of the Tibetan Plateau

The geological evolution of the Tibetan plateau is best viewed in a context broader than the India-Eurasia collision zone. After collision about 50 million years ago, crust was shortened in western and central Tibet, while large fragments of lithosphere moved from the collision zone toward areas of trench rollback in the western Pacific and Indonesia. Cessation of rapid Pacific trench migration ( approximately 15 to 20 million years ago) coincided with a slowing of fragment extrusion beyond the plateau and probably contributed to the onset of rapid surface uplift and crustal thickening in eastern Tibet. The latter appear to result from rapid eastward flow of the deep crust, probably within crustal channels imaged seismically beneath eastern Tibet. These events mark a transition to the modern structural system that currently accommodates deformation within Tibet.     

Dynamics of Saturn's south polar vortex

The camera onboard the Cassini spacecraft has allowed us to observe many of Saturn's cloud features. We present observations of Saturn's south polar vortex (SPV) showing that it shares some properties with terrestrial hurricanes: cyclonic circulation, warm central region (the eye) surrounded by a ring of high clouds (the eye wall), and convective clouds outside the eye. The polar location and the absence of an ocean are major differences. It also shares properties with the polar vortices on Venus, such as polar location, cyclonic circulation, warm center, and long lifetime, but the Venus vortices have cold collars and are not associated with convective clouds. The SPV's combination of properties is unique among vortices in the solar system.     

Variable azimuthal anisotropy in Earth's lowermost mantle

A persistent reversal in the expected polarity of the initiation of vertically polarized shear waves that graze the D' layer (the layer at the boundary between the outer core and the lower mantle of Earth) in some regions starts at the arrival time of horizontally polarized shear waves. Full waveform modeling of the split shear waves for paths beneath the Caribbean requires azimuthal anisotropy at the base of the mantle. Models with laterally coherent patterns of transverse isotropy with the hexagonal symmetry axis of the mineral phases tilted from the vertical by as much as 20 degrees are consistent with the data. Small-scale convection cells within the mantle above the D' layer may cause the observed variations by inducing laterally variable crystallographic or shape-preferred orientation in minerals in the D' layer.