Ask most people how to determine a dog’s age in human years, and they’ll probably say, “Multiply by seven.” However, this method is inaccurate, and more so the older a dog gets. […]

Dogs mature faster than humans, reaching the equivalent of twenty-one years in only two, but then aging slows to an average of four human years every year after.

So, next time someone asks you a dog’s age in human years, you’ll know how to give a more accurate answer. Subtract two from the age, multiply that by four and add twenty-one.

{ Cesar’s Way | Continue reading }

At this time last year, the price of a frozen, euthanized mouse was 45 cents. But now, that price has nearly doubled. […]

Mice and rats are in high demand as a main food source at a clinic that houses and rehabilitates 4,000 to 5,000 injured, orphaned and displaced wild animals every year.

{ LJ World | Continue reading }

photo { Nico Krijno }

Blind dog taken for walks by guide cat.

{ Driving school for dogs in New Zealand | Thanks Tim }

Godiva, often referred to as Lady Godiva, was an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants.

The name “Peeping Tom” for a voyeur originates from later versions of this legend in which a man named Tom had watched her ride and was struck blind or dead.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Bo Derek photographed by John Derek, 1984 }

Bees at a cluster of apiaries in northeastern France have been producing honey in mysterious shades of blue and green, alarming their keepers who now believe residue from containers of M&M’s candy processed at a nearby biogas plant is the cause.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

{ Progress in Automatic Giraffe Recognition | Improbable Research | Detecting, Localizing and Recovering Kinematics of Textured Animals | PDF }

A new study shows how the behavior of dogs has been misunderstood for generations: in fact using misplaced ideas about dog behavior and training is likely to cause rather than cure unwanted behavior. […]

Contrary to popular belief, aggressive dogs are NOT trying to assert their dominance over their canine or human “pack.” […]

The researchers spent six months studying dogs freely interacting at a Dogs Trust rehoming centre, and reanalyzing data from studies of feral dogs, before concluding that individual relationships between dogs are learnt through experience rather than motivated by a desire to assert “dominance.”

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

Finding rats in the town dump is hardly cause for comment in most of the world. Rattus norvergicus (the Norway rat) has spread to all but a few bits of the planet, giving rise to the urban myth that city dwellers are never more than six feet away from a rodent.

However, the western Canadian province of Alberta has prided itself on being one of those rat-free bits for more than half a century. So when an infestation was discovered in early August outside Medicine Hat, a city of 72,000 people, it was headline news.

Pest-control officers installed high-definition cameras to track the rats, set up poisoned traps to catch them and released two bull snakes to kill those too wary to be trapped. The snakes, which look like rattlesnakes but are non-venomous constrictors, had been caught after citizens complained. They are normally released in a wilderness area when found in town, but in this case they were deployed to the dump.

Pictures of dead rats (those not disposed of by the snakes) seemed to signal early success. But as the corpses continued to pile up—there were 103 by August 27th—and rats were sighted in residential areas, the city opened a new front in the war: Operation Haystack. This involved stacking bales of hay stuffed with poison at 15 locations. Alison Redford, the provincial premier, promised the extermination effort would be “unrelenting.”

{ Business Insider | Continue reading }

That’s patient X, the former US marine who suffered a bite from his pet rattlesnake. Patient X, the man who immediately after the bite insisted that a neighbour attach car spark plug wires to his lip, and that the neighbour rev up the car engine to 3000 rpm, repeatedly, for about five minutes. Patient X, the bloated, blackened, corpse-like individual who subsequently was helicoptered to a hospital, where Dr Richard C Dart and Dr Richard A Gustafson saved his life and took photographs of him. […]

Though rattlesnake bites can be deadly, there is a standard, reliable treatment – injection with a substance called “antivenin”. Patient X preferred an alternative treatment. The medical report explains: “Based on their understanding of an article in an outdoorsman’s magazine, the patient and his neighbour had previously established a plan to use electric shock treatment if either was envenomated.”

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Jason Nocito }

{ Melanie Griffith, Tippi Hedren’s daughter, and Togar, their pet lion | more }

Consciousness is restricted to a subset of animals with relatively complex brains. The more scientists study animal behavior and brain anatomy, however, the more universal consciousness seems to be. A brain as complex as the human brain is definitely not necessary for consciousness. On July 7 this year, a group of neuroscientists convening at Cambridge University signed a document officially declaring that non-human animals, “including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses” are conscious.

Humans are more than just conscious—they are also self-aware. Scientists differ on the difference between consciousness and self-awareness, but here is one common explanation: […] To be conscious is to think; to be self-aware is to realize that you are a thinking being and to think about your thoughts. […]

Numerous neuroimaging studies have suggested that thinking about ourselves, recognizing images of ourselves and reflecting on our thoughts and feelings—that is, different forms self-awareness—all involve the cerebral cortex, the outermost, intricately wrinkled part of the brain. The fact that humans have a particularly large and wrinkly cerebral cortex relative to body size supposedly explains why we seem to be more self-aware than most other animals.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

A group of leading neuroscientists has used a conference at Cambridge University to make an official declaration recognising consciousness in animals. […]

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states.”

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

photo { Ernst Haas, The Misfits, Nevada, 1960 }

You walk into your shower and find a spider. You are not an arachnologist. You do, however, know that any one of the four following options is possible:

a. The spider is real and harmless.

b. The spider is real and venomous.

c. Your next-door neighbor, who dislikes your noisy dog, has turned her personal surveillance spider (purchased from “Drones ‘R Us” for $49.95) loose and is monitoring it on her iPhone from her seat at a sports bar downtown. The pictures of you, undressed, are now being relayed on several screens during the break of an NFL game, to the mirth of the entire neighborhood.

d. Your business competitor has sent his drone assassin spider, which he purchased from a bankrupt military contractor, to take you out. Upon spotting you with its sensors, and before you have any time to weigh your options, the spider shoots an infinitesimal needle into a vein in your left leg and takes a blood sample. As you beat a retreat out of the shower, your blood sample is being run on your competitor’s smartphone for a DNA match. The match is made against a DNA sample of you that is already on file at EVER.com (Everything about Everybody), an international DNA database (with access available for $179.99). Once the match is confirmed (a matter of seconds), the assassin spider outruns you with incredible speed into your bedroom, pausing only long enough to dart another needle, this time containing a lethal dose of a synthetically produced, undetectable poison, into your bloodstream. Your assassin, who is on a summer vacation in Provence, then withdraws his spider under the crack of your bedroom door and out of the house and presses its self-destruct button. No trace of the spider or the poison it carried will ever be found by law enforcement authorities.

This is the future. According to some uncertain estimates, insect-sized drones will become operational by 2030.

{ Gabriella Blum/Hoover Institution/Stanford University | PDF }

photo { Alexander Hammid, Maya Deren, 1945 }

{ Renhui Zhao | Martin Honert }

{ Thanks Jessica }

Mating can be dangerous. At least 100 years ago, biologists began to speculate that sex in the animal kingdom could be a very risky business. The noises can attract predators, the male is distracted and he has less energy to fight off an attacker or to run away. Perhaps that is why males almost always attempt to finish so quickly. Surprisingly, however, there has been little evidence to support this hypothesis until recently. Two lab studies and one in the field have shown that mating increases the risk of predation in freshwater amphipods, water striders and locusts.

Now a new study shows very strong evidence of the effect in flies.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

images { 1. Sanne Sannes | 2. Ciler }

related { Women in love less likely to initiate sex, finds study }

‘Many scientists don’t like to talk about shark sex,’ Juliet Eilperin writes in her entertaining study of sharks and their world. ‘They worry it will only reinforce the popular perception that these creatures are brutish and unrelenting.’ In as far as we understand the subject – only a few species have been observed mating – the business is ‘very rough’. Larger male sharks have to bite or trap the females to keep them around during courtship; marine biologists can tell when a female has been mating because her skin will be raw or bleeding. The process is so violent that, come the mating season, female nurse sharks will stay in shallow water with their reproductive openings pressed firmly to the sea floor. Otherwise they risk falling prey to roaming bands of males who ‘will take turns inserting their claspers in her’ (the clasper is the shark version of a penis, found in a pair behind the pelvic fins). A litter of fifty pups will have anything from two to seven fathers.

But the reproductive story gets rougher still. A number of shark species go in for oophagy, or uterine cannibalism. Sand tiger foetuses ‘eat each other in utero, acting out the harshest form of sibling rivalry imaginable’. Only two babies emerge, one from each of the mother shark’s uteruses: the survivors have eaten everything else.

{ London Review of Books | Continue reading }

Single-Nostril Navigational Reliance in Pigeons

We recorded the flight tracks of pigeons with previous homing experience equipped with a GPS data logger and released from an unfamiliar location with the right or the left nostril occluded. The analysis of the tracks revealed that the flight path of the birds with the right nostril occluded was more tortuous than that of unmanipulated controls. Moreover, the pigeons smelling with the left nostril interrupted their journey significantly more frequently and displayed more exploratory activity than the control birds, e.g. during flights around a stopover site.

[…]

How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency

Democracies would be better off if they chose some of their politicians at random. That’s the word, mathematically obtained, from the Catanians’ extension of their random research, using insights they gleaned from the much earlier stupidity work by Cipolla.

Parliamentary voting behavior echoes, in a surprisingly detailed mathematical sense. Cipolla had sketched this in the “Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.” Cipolla gave an insulting, yet possibly accurate, description of any human group: “human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit, and the stupid.” Pluchino, Rapisarda, Garofalo and their colleagues base their mathematical model partly on this fourfold distinction.

{ Annals of Improbable Research | full issue }

photo { Daniel Seung Lee }

Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work.

{ Nature | Continue reading | NERS/Discover }

artwork { Trevor Brown }