Dogs sense when humans are in distress

Dogs may empathise with humans more than any other animal, including humans themselves, two new studies suggest.
The latest research, published in the journal Animal Cognition, found that pet dogs may truly be man (or woman's) best friend if a person is in distress. That distressed individual does not even have to be someone the dog knows.
"I think there is good reason to suspect dogs would be more sensitive to human emotion than other species," says co-author Deborah Custance.
"We have domesticated dogs over a long period of time. We have selectively bred them to act as our companions."
"Thus," she adds," those dogs that responded sensitively to our emotional cues may have been the individuals that we would be more likely to keep as pets and breed from."
Custance and colleague Jennifer Mayer, both from the Department of Psychology at the University of London Goldsmiths College, exposed 18 pet dogs - representing different ages and breeds - to four separate 20-second human encounters. The human participants included the dogs' owners as well as strangers.
During one experimental condition, the people hummed in a weird way. For that one, the scientists were trying to see if unusual behaviour itself could trigger canine concern. The people also talked and pretended to cry.
The majority of the dogs comforted the person, owner or not, when that individual was pretending to cry. The dogs acted submissive as they nuzzled and licked the person, the canine version of "there there."
Custance and Mayer say this behaviour is consistent with empathic concern and the offering of comfort.

Brain signals

As for what could be going on in the dog's head, yet another recent study, published in PLoS ONE , showed how the brains of dogs react as the canines view humans. In this case, the researchers trained dogs to respond to hand signals that meant the pups would receive a hot dog treat. Another signal meant no such treat was coming.
The caudate region of the dogs' brains, an area associated with rewards in humans, showed activation when the canines knew a tasty food treat was coming.
"These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals," says lead researcher Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy. "And these signals may have a direct line to the dog's reward system."
In that study, the reward was food, but Custance and Mayer think canines over the thousands of years of domestication have been rewarded so much for approaching distressed human companions that this may somehow be hardwired into today's dogs.
The phenomenon in some cases could even have a subconscious element. Consider what happens when a person yawns and a dog is in the room.
"Dogs show contagious yawning to human yawns," says Matthew Campbell, an assistant professor in Georgia State University's Department of Psychology.
"We have selected dogs to be in tune with us emotionally," Campbell says.
Custance and Mayer next hope to determine how empathetic wolves may be.
"It would be interesting to see how wolves who have been raised in human households would respond if they took part in our experiment," says Custance.
"Would they behave like domestic dogs or show less response to a crying human? It would be fascinating to find out."

Potential drug for deadly brain cancer

Potential drug for deadly brain cancer

Current therapies for glioblastoma multiforme wipe out the tumour cells initially, but cancer stem cells may cause the tumours to recur. The new potential drug targets the biomarker for the cancer stem cells and can therefore stop tumour growth altogether.  Image: janulla/iStockphoto A*STAR scientists have identified a biomarker of the most lethal form of brain tumours in adults - glioblastoma multiforme. The scientists found that by targeting this biomarker and depleting it with a potential drug, they were able to prevent the progression and relapse of the brain tumour. This research was conducted by scientists at A*STAR's Institute of Medical Biology led by Dr Prabha Sampath, Principal Investigator, in collaboration with A*STAR's Bioinformatics Institute (BII), and clinical collaborators from Medical University of Graz, Austria, and National University of Singapore. The research findings were published on Aug 23 in the scientific journal, Cell Reports from Cell Press. The scientists found that the biomarker, miR-138, is highly expressed in cancer stem cells compared to normal neural stem cells. They thus carried out in vitro experiments to deplete miR-138 in these cancer stem cells with a potential drug, antimiR-138, to observe the effect. They found that when miR-138 is depleted, the cancer cells are completely destroyed. This is an important breakthrough as current therapies such as gamma radiation and surgical methods proved to be inadequate in treating these brain tumours, which tend to re-grow from cancer stem cells and become extremely lethal. Dr Sampath said, "In this study we have identified a master regulator, miR-138, which is essential for the progression and relapse of a deadly form of brain cancer. By targeting this regulator we can effectively prevent the recurrence of this lethal form of cancer. This promising finding will pave the way for the development of a novel therapy to successfully treat the aggressive forms of brain cancer." Studies were also done in mice to determine whether antimiR-138 could effectively inhibit the growth of tumours. These experiments were conducted with a control drug as well, revealing that tumours continued to be present when mice were injected with the control, while injection with the antimiR-138 showed no tumour growth after nine months. Dr Alan Colman, Executive Director of Singapore Stem Cell Consortium and a Principal Investigator at IMB said, "Malignant gliomas are a particularly devastating and lethal form of human brain cancer. As with a growing number of other cancers, evidence is accumulating that the persistence and chemo-resistance of this cancer is due to the presence of glioma stem cells (GSCs). In this exciting publication, Sampath and colleagues indicate that in the tumours, these GSCs express the microRNA-138 (miR-138) and that the targeted elimination of this RNA markedly reduced the growth and survival of GSCs in cell culture. This work highlights the possible significance of miR-138 as a prognostic biomarker and also suggests miR-138 synthesis as a target for therapeutic intervention." Prof Sir David Lane, Chief Scientist at A*STAR, added, "These findings will facilitate the translation of basic research into clinical applications such as targeted drug design to treat brain cancer. This is an excellent example of how A*STAR's impactful research can be applied to develop treatments for diseases like cancer."

Robot learns to recognise itself in a mirror

Nico the robot looking at its reflection in the mirror. Image: Justin Hart/ Yale University

Self-awareness is the next big step for thinking robots.
A robot at Yale University, US, has passed an important milestone of self-awareness by interpreting information from the real world i.e. observing its reflection in the mirror and determining the perspective from this information. It’s not quite up to the standards of Ridley Scott’s replicants or WALL-E, but it’s a notable step in the world of artificial intelligence.
“Self-awareness is a key developmental step on the road to social intelligence,” says Dr Mary-Anne Williams from the University of Technology, Sydney, who was not involved with the study. “Society does not want robotists to develop robots with cognitive disorders and deficiencies so robotics researchers are increasingly spending more effort developing social skills for robots so that they can interact and collaborate with people more effectively.”
The robot, named Nico, is part of an experiment to see whether a robot can fulfill a classic trial of self-awareness, called the ‘mirror test.’ This test usually involves an animal being assessed on whether it can recognise that a mark on the body it sees in the mirror is its own. The alternative is that the animal perceives the mirror as being an extension to another room, which is why pets will often make a fuss when they see their reflection, believing it to be a stranger rather than their own image. So far, only dolphins, orcas, elephants, magpies, humans and a few other apes have passed.
Nico has been able to pass the test, and is able to look in the mirror and see its hand, which it recognises because of a visual token attached to it. “The robot watches its arm move in its visual field, and learns about the structure of the arm, how it moves through space, and the relationship between the arm and the visual field,” says PhD student Justin Hart, who conducted the research under the supervision of Professor Brian Scassellati. “It builds an expectation of where it expects to see its hand, visually, in both 3D and 2D—as imaged by the robot’s cameras—after a motion.”
From here, it is able to infer the perspective of reflections in the mirror based on watching the motion of its arm. Knowing this perspective allows the robot to accurately estimate where objects are in space based on their reflections. “It is important to distinguish that this is unique from the traditional mirror test, as proposed by Gordon Gallup in 1970,” Hart says. “This test is specifically about the robot being able to use a mirror for spatial reasoning.”
Hart believes that this work will aid in bringing robots into people’s everyday lives. He has demonstrated that the robot is already able to adjust its model in order to use tools, and that similar adaptations could compensate for damage to the robot. For example, letting a robot perform tasks unforeseen by the engineers who developed it by allowing it to learn and reason about its body in order to attempt to perform the task at hand.
“What makes this exciting, in terms of self-awareness, is that the robot is able to use knowledge that it has learned about itself in order to reason about a thing in its environment—the mirror—in a way that robots really haven’t been able to do before,” Hart says. “I believe that self-awareness is an important part of the picture in artificial intelligence, but it is not the endgame. It is just a step along the way.”

The pigmented cells in the skin of squid, octopi and cuttlefish are called chromatophores. The chromatophores are under muscular and neurological control, and they can change in size as well as color intensity, which is why these animals ca

n brilliantly camouflage and change their appearance so dramatically. So what happens when you insert an electrode into the fin nerve of a squid and hook it up to some groovy tunes on an ipod nano? Dancing chromatophores!

Watch the video: http://bit.ly/TFeteS

amazing shot

An amazing shot of the Northern Lights or aurora borealis over Iceland. This beautiful phenomenon, most commonly witnessed close to the North or South Pole, occurs when particles expelled from the Sun pass through the Earth's magnetic field and interact with atoms of oxygen, nitrogen and other elements.

Small male fish have 'Napoleon complex'

Monday, 03 September 2012

 

A male desert goby performing an aggressive display. By being more aggressive early on, the small males may hope to scare their opponent off and avoid a fight altogether, according to the researchers. These males were dubbed as having he 'Napoleon complex', after the French general Napoleon Bonaparte who apparently compensated being small with an aggressive personality.

Image: P. Andreas Svensson

In the deserts of central Australia lives a tough little fish known as the desert goby, and a new study is shedding light on the aggressive mating behaviour of smaller nest-holding males.

Published in the PLoS ONE journal, a study led by Dr Andreas Svensson of Linnaeus University in Sweden in collaboration with Monash University and the University of Turku, Finland, investigated what determined such aggression observed in smaller nest-holding males.
The overly aggressive males were dubbed ‘the Napoleon complex’ after the French general Napoleon Bonaparte who was thought to compensate his allegedly short stature with an aggressive personality.
In this species, the eggs are cared for by their father who will aggressively defend his nest against intruders. Once he attracts a female back to his nest to lay her eggs, he fans the eggs with his pectoral fins keeping them oxygenated. The researchers were surprised to find that small nesting males were more aggressive toward intruders than larger males.

Study co-author Dr Bob Wong, a Senior Lecturer at Monash University’s School of Biological Sciences and an expert in behavioural and evolutionary ecology, said to attack early may be a beneficial strategy for small males, because they avoid revealing their inferiority to the intruder.

“In the animal world, competing males are expected to partake in a drawn out escalation of aggression, to avoid the risks of being injured by a superior opponent,” Dr Wong said.

“We found the aggression of males was not affected by the presence of females and perceived mating opportunities or larger male intruders. Instead their aggression was related to their size.

“In particular, smaller males attacked sooner and with greater intensity compared to larger males, suggesting that nesting desert goby males used routine, rather than conditional, strategies for initiating aggression.”

Dr Svensson said if intruders were more likely to flee than retaliate, small males could benefit from attacking intruders before they had an opportunity to assess them.

“The only hope for a small male may be that an intruder would then leave, without a fight,” Dr Svensson said.

The hardy desert goby can tolerate extreme conditions and can be found in water twice as salty as the ocean and survive huge fluctuations in temperature – all important survival skills for a fish living in the desert.

The research was presented at the International Behavioural Ecology Congress in Sweden in August 2012.

57-million-year-old digging mammal

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The pangolin, or 'scaly anteater', is the only mammal to have large keratin scales covering its skin. It belongs to the order Pholidota, along with a number of extinct species. Credit: Sandip kumar; Wikimedia

Palaeontologists have taken a closer look at the fossilised remains of a rare, 57-million-year-old mammal to discover that this dogged digger was more closely related to the modern-day pangolin, or ‘scaly anteater’, than we thought.
The creature is Ernanodon antelios, an extinct placental species of mammal from Asia that grew to around the size of a badger, with powerful limbs and large, specialised claws for scratch-digging its meals and shelter out of the dry earth. It lived during the Paleocene epoch, a geological era that spanned 65.5 to 56 million years ago, just after the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. As first epoch of the Cenozoic era, often called the ‘age of the mammals’, the Paleocene saw the first appearance of many modern orders of mammals such as horses and rhinos.
Very little is known about E. antelios, because all researchers have had to work with for the past 30 years has been an ambiguous, warped set of fossilised bones discovered in Guangdong Province of China in 1973, while, until recently, a better preserved specimen has been sitting in storage since it was unearthed in 1979.

Original Chinese field record on the discovery of the first skeleton of Ernanodon antelios in 1973. Credit: Suyin Ting

The latter specimen, a near-complete skeleton discovered by researchers from the Paleontological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in a layer of Mongolian rocks, preserves most of the arms, legs and backbone of the animal, including an array of bones that were not preserved in the 1973 specimen. This week, palaeontologists Alexander Agadjanian and Peter Kondrashov from the Borissiak Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences published a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, describing for the first time this specimen in detail, and putting to rest a debate that has raged for over three decades regarding E. antelios’ evolutionary relationships with modern mammals.
Following a series of papers questioning the authenticity of the holotype, including a 2003 study that claimed it represented two completely different taxa and elements that might have originated from different localities, it was concluded that, fortunately, the specimen was just extremely deformed. Which didn’t make the classification of the animal it once belonged to any easier, so for years, there was disagreement on whether E. antelios was more closely related to the order called Xenarthra, which includes anteaters, tree sloths and armadillos, or the Pholidota, an Old World order to which only seven living species of pangolin now belong, or the Palaeanodonta, an entirely extinct order of mammals. The telltale signs for Kondrashov and Agadjanian, were the animal’s legs, teeth and claws. “Every detail of the structure of the humerus of Ernanodon corresponds well to that of a digging mammal,” the researchers reported, adding that its hind limb muscular was well developed to support the body as it dug, and the teeth were minimal, suggesting a diet of small insects. The claws would have been impressive, the authors describing the ungual phalanges, or claws, on the hands as “extremely large” and robust, about 3.5cm long.

Skeletons of Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) (top) and Ernanodon antelios (bottom) from China. Specimens are not to scale. Credit: Peter Kondrashov

A detailed comparison of the animal’s morphology made it clear that rather than being a close relative to armadillos and anteaters, E. antelios shared more in common with the mysterious Palaeanodonts, with the Pholidota – the pangolins – sitting alongside as a sister group. So this strange Asian Paleocene mammal turns out to be a very early side branch of the pangolin family tree. “Few other fossil mammals presented as many controversies in the scientific world as Ernanodon did,” Kondrashov said, “and we are glad the new skeleton helped us resolve them.”