Via his father's testimony, Art Spiegelman in Maus seems to demonstrate that there is divine intervention in human affairs. Vladek's predictive dream aboutParshas Truma (Exod. 25-27), as well as the ...prediction of the Polish priest at Auschwitz and the Gypsy fortune-teller's prognostication to Anja, point to the presence of a divine hand in Vladek's and Anja's survival. Vladek's ostensible stinginess is actually a fulfillment of Parshas Truma's invitation to give God gifts, making Vladek especially worthy of divine favor. But the hidden purpose behind the couple's survival is that it enables the birth of their son Art, who would create Maus. Richieu's death and Anja's later suicide also contribute to the creation of Maus, and are thereby invested with meaning. Parshas Truma, which concerns the construction of the Tabernacle and Ark, and was Art's Bar Mitzvah portion, provides the key to the aesthetic structure as well as to the significance of Maus.□
Cosmic rays, along with stellar radiation and magnetic fields, are known to make up a significant fraction of the energy density of galaxies such as the Milky Way. When cosmic rays interact in the ...interstellar medium, they produce gamma-ray emission which provides an important indication of how the cosmic rays propagate. Gamma rays from the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), located 785 kpc away, provide a unique opportunity to study cosmic-ray acceleration and diffusion in a galaxy with a structure and evolution very similar to the Milky Way. Using 33 months of data from the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, we search for TeV gamma rays from the galactic plane of M31. We also investigate past and present evidence of galactic activity in M31 by searching for Fermi Bubble-like structures above and below the galactic nucleus. No significant gamma-ray emission is observed, so we use the null result to compute upper limits on the energy density of cosmic rays \(>10\) TeV in M31. The computed upper limits are approximately ten times higher than expected from the extrapolation of the Fermi LAT results.
Many organisms continue to grow their skeletons throughout ontogeny. In the shells of molluscs, protists, and brachiopods and in bovid horns, accretionary spiral growth provides a detailed and ...continuous growth history. Although a shell may be described as a single static form, the overall morphology is a summation of the ongoing accretionary process. For this reason, an explicitly ontogenetic characterization of form provides insight into the final form achieved. Analysis of landmark transformations offers direct access to major components of morphological variation, both among adult individuals and through an individual's ontogeny. Parameters of preconceived, abstract geometric models can also be used to characterize morphological variation, but there is no guarantee that these parameters will coincide with the major features of shape variation. In order to locate landmarks at equivalent ontogenetic stages, features that indicate ontogenetic stage of coiled forms must be identified (e.g., growth increments, age, size, whorls). The gastropod Epitonium (Nitidiscala) tinctum exhibits prominent varices that provide landmark locations throughout ontogeny. Recent specimens of this species were obtained from three localities in Baja, Mexico. The morphological variation among individuals, treated as whole shells and within individual ontogenies, was analyzed using shape coordinates of landmark configurations. Deformation of shape is expressed in the uniform and nonuniform shape subspaces. The empirical components of shape variation found are similar to those generated by two parameters of an equiangular spiral: θ, the angle between consecutive varices, and W, the whorl expansion rate. The distribution of individuals is examined within morphospaces constructed from these shape features. Three scales of analysis are necessary to characterize adequately the shape variation within and among specimens. The smallest scale is equivalent to increment-by-increment changes in θ and W. The middle scale comprises variation equivalent to whorls resulting from systematic changes in θ and W during an individual's ontogeny. Finally, there is the overall ontogenetic trajectory. Mean shape must be a function of initial shape and ontogenetic trajectory in shape. Mean forms that are found to have similar shapes at the same arbitrary growth increment may achieve that shape in different ways.
Due to the high energies and long distances to the sources, astrophysical observations provide a unique opportunity to test possible signatures of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV). Superluminal LIV ...enables the decay of photons at high energy. The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory is among the most sensitive gamma-ray instruments currently operating above 10 TeV. HAWC finds evidence of 100 TeV photon emission from at least four astrophysical sources. These observations exclude, for the strongest of the limits set, the LIV energy scale to \(2.2\times10^{31}\) eV, over 1800 times the Planck energy and an improvement of 1 to 2 orders of magnitude over previous limits.
