Horn was in critical condition for several weeks thereafter, and was said to have suffered a stroke and partial paralysis. Doctors removed one-quarter of his skull to relieve the pressure of his swelling brain during an operation known as a decompressive craniectomy. The portion of skull was placed in a pouch in Horn's abdomen in the hope of replacing it later. Horn was eventually transferred to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California for long-term recovery and rehabilitation.
As of 2006, Horn was walking, assisted only by Fischbacher, and talking. To host Pat O'Brien on the television news program The Insider, he complained about his daily rehabilitation, "They are slave drivers over there. You'd think they are the KGB from Russia."
It is disputed whether or not the tiger intentionally attacked Horn. Montecore had been trained by Horn since he was a cub; he had performed with the act for six years. Fischbacher, appearing on the Larry King interview program, said Horn fell during the act and Montecore was attempting to drag him to safety, as a mother tigress would pull one of her cubs by the neck. Fischbacher said Montecore had no way of knowing that Horn, unlike a tiger cub, did not have fur and thick skin covering his neck and that his neck was vulnerable to injury. Fischbacher said if Montecore had wanted to injure Horn, the tiger would have snapped his neck and shaken him back and forth.
Former Mirage owner Steve Wynn (who hired the duo in 1990) told Las Vegas television station KLAS-TV the events were substantiated as described by Fischbacher. According to Wynn, there was a woman with a "big hairdo" in the front row who, he says, "fascinated and distracted" Montecore. The woman reached out to attempt to pet the animal, and Horn jumped between the woman and the tiger.
According to Wynn, Horn said, "Release, release," attempting to persuade Montecore to let go of his arm, and eventually striking the tiger with his microphone. Horn tripped over the cat's paw and fell on his back; stagehands then rushed out and jumped on the cat. It was only then, said Wynn, that the confused tiger leaned over Roy and attempted to carry Horn off the stage to safety. Wynn said that although the tiger's teeth inflicted puncture wounds that caused Horn to lose blood, there was no damage to his neck. Stagehands then sprayed Roy and Montecore with a fire extinguisher to separate the two.
Montecore was put into quarantine for ten days in order to ensure he was not rabid, and was then returned to his habitat at The Mirage. While Horn has requested that Montecore not be harmed, the incident may augur the end of exotic animal shows in which there are no barriers between tigers and audience members. Some animal rights activists, many of whom oppose the use of wild animals in live entertainment, sought to use the incident as a springboard for publicity, though few have ever accused the Siegfried & Roy show of mistreating animals.
The injury to Roy Horn prompted The Mirage to close the show indefinitely and to lay off 267 cast and crew members with one week's severance pay. While Fischbacher has said "the show will go on", a hotel spokesman told the production staff that they "should explore other career opportunities."
According to the Las Vegas Advisor, The Mirage will suffer financially, not just from the loss of $50+ million in annual ticket sales, but from having to forgo untold millions in sales of food, beverages, hotel rooms and the casino's gambling winnings. An MGM Mirage spokesman said losing Siegfried & Roy is a bigger hit to the Mirage brand than to its finances, because the entertainers are "practically the faces" of the hotel, and finding a new hotel brand or identity will be difficult.
In February 2009, the duo staged a "final" appearance with Montecore as a benefit for The Lou Ruvo Brain Institute. This performance was recorded for broadcast on ABC television's 20/20 program. The 10-minute program featured one of Siegfried & Roy's signature illusions, in which Siegfried and Montecore (now 12 years old) magically switched places from within separate, locked transparent enclosures.
On April 23, 2010, the duo officially said farewell to show business. “The last time we closed, we didn’t have a lot of warning,” said longtime manager Bernie Yuman. “This is farewell. This is the dot at the end of the sentence.”
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'Intelligent' oil droplet navigates chemical maze by Colin Barras
There's some humbling news from the chemical world for anyone who has ever found themselves lost in a garden maze. A simple droplet of organic solvent can find its way through a complicated labyrinth with nothing more to go on than a slight pH difference.
Bartosz Grzybowski's team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, used a common polymer to fashion a two-dimensional labyrinth some 2 centimetres on each side. They then flooded the maze with strongly alkaline potassium hydroxide solution, before placing a hydrochloric acid-soaked chunk of gel at the maze exit.
After about 40 seconds they placed a droplet of mineral oil containing hexyldecanoic acid at the maze entrance. The oil, which cannot mix with the potassium hydroxide solution, sits on the surface. But it remains still only for a matter of seconds – it soon begins tearing around the maze at speeds of up to 10 millimetres per second, sniffing out the shortest path to the acid-soaked gel, and solving the maze in the process.
"In the movie files you can see the droplet makes decisions," says Grzybowski. "It goes left along the wrong path, decides there's something fishy with that and so it reverses. It looks almost alive."
But while Grzybowski says the droplet displays behaviour that might be called "primitive intelligence", there's a simple chemical mechanism at work.
The droplet leaches its acid into the surrounding solution, losing hydrogen ions in a process known as deprotonation – a process that affects the surface tension of the droplet itself.
"But to the front and rear of the droplet [the surrounding solution] has a different pH," he says, because of diffusion from the acid-soaked gel at the maze exit. Those tiny pH differences affect the amount of deprotonation that happens at the front and rear of the droplet, and this asymmetry sets up a surface tension gradient that forces the droplet into motion. "I would say the droplet is self-propellant," he says.
Grzybowski's team thinks that the behaviour could have implications for cancer treatments. They would like to develop micelles – aggregates of molecules such as balls of lipids – that can navigate pH gradients in the body. "A good reason for that is cancer is more acidic than the rest of the body," Grzybowski says.
But the chemical behaviour could also offer an explanation for the apparently intelligent behaviour of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, which 10 years ago was shown to possess similar maze-solving abilities by Toshiyuki Nakagaki, now at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
"The [new] finding is interesting since it gives an insight of possible physical mechanisms for Physarum to find a path in the maze," Nakagaki says.
Journal reference: Journal of the American Chemical Society, DOI: 10.1021/ja9076793
Some cool mazes for you to enjoy after reading this article....
Hallucamazenic Maze-A-Delic - Ink On Paper, Winter 2006,
by Yonatan Frimer
www.TeamOfMonkeys.com
Your source for mazes.
Maze Kong - Ink on Paper
Maze of the Statue of Liberty - 2009
Maze of Liberty - 2009 - Yonatan Frimer
Which maze of the statue of liberty do you like better. The psychedelic one or the line art one? Answer with care down bellow in the comments. Thanks
Psychedelic Liberty Maze
