As a nerdy and angst-ridden young woman, the most influential artist to my preteen years was Tori Amos, so I’ll spare you my musical reminiscing, break the current theme for a sec, and post some science shit.

Like many at the time, Soviet scientists of the 50’s and 60’s were totally down with vivisection, even if it was just to mess around with stuff and see what stuffs they could do. Consequently, commie dogs were shot into space, dead dogs revived, and dogs’ heads were kept alive independently of their bodies. In experiments that were running concurrently, the scientist Vladimir Demikhov thought, “I am a big fan of Sir Didymus and his canine steed from Labyrinth, yet wouldn’t it be awesome if I could create a creature like this that was one singular beast?” So he chopped puppies in half at the torso and attached them on the backs of other dogs, and made sure to take these false Cerberuses out for walksies and drinks of milk (which promptly rolled out of the puppies’ open esophaguses and down the dogs’ backs). (Please note that the link is fine, but don’t watch the video on the page if you love dogs.)

I’m not naive enough to think that worse things have never been done in the name of science, but as soon as I realized that the big dog wasn’t just wearing a little doggie hat in this picture, I stopped giggling and started pondering the profound cruelty of human nature. Apparently these experiments were done to explore the viability of organ transplants, but one wonders why Demikhov couldn’t have just swapped hearts between the dogs and saved them some humiliation? Would humans really be in the market, ever, for surgically-implanted Kuatos? (You might think yes, but FYI, the longest lived dog-dog only lasted a month.) You can read about this experiment and more scientific weirdness on Museum of Hoaxes and in the new book Elephants on Acid.

In other (less grotesque) animal news, Mystery hamster in epic voyage is the best (non-NYPost) headline I’ve ever read. It’s also, maybe, a movie that I would like to see.