Beloved Pharaoh. Born: June 3rd., 2003 – Died: June 19th., 2017. A very special dog that will never be forgotten.
Dogs live in the present – they just are! Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value. Yet they have been part of man’s world for an unimaginable time, at least 30,000 years. That makes the domesticated dog the longest animal companion to man, by far!
As man’s companion, protector and helper, history suggests that dogs were critically important in man achieving success as a hunter-gatherer. Dogs ‘teaching’ man to be so successful a hunter enabled evolution, some 20,000 years later, to farming, thence the long journey to modern man. But in the last, say 100 years, that farming spirit has become corrupted to the point where we see the planet’s plant and mineral resources as infinite. Mankind is close to the edge of extinction, literally and spiritually.
Dogs know better, much better! Time again for man to learn from dogs!
More information about the power of smell of the dog.
(And it also includes the wolf.)
I am going straight into the article, from Wikipedia, about the sense of smell of the dog.
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The dog sense of smell is the most powerful sense of this species, the olfactory system of canines being much more complex and developed than that of humans.[1] It is believed to be up to 10 million times as sensitive as a human’s in specialized breeds. Dogs have roughly forty times more smell-sensitive receptorsthan humans, ranging from about 125 million to nearly 300 million in some dog breeds, such as bloodhounds.[1] These receptors are spread over an area about the size of a pocket handkerchief (compared to 5 million over an area the size of a postage stamp for humans).[2][3] Dogs’ sense of smell also includes the use of the vomeronasal organ, which is used primarily for social interactions.
The dog has mobile nostrils that help it determine the direction of the scent. Unlike humans, dogs do not need to fill up their lungs as they continuously bring odors into their noses in bursts of 3–7 sniffs. Dog noses have a bony structure inside that humans do not have, which allows the air that has been sniffed to pass over a bony shelf to which odor molecules adhere. The air above this shelf is not washed out when the dog breathes normally, so the scent molecules accumulate in the nasal chambers and the scent builds with intensity, allowing the dog to detect the faintest of odors and can even detect emotions.[4]: 247
One study into the learning ability of dogs compared to wolves indicated that dogs have a better sense of smell than wolves when locating hidden food, but there has yet been no experimental data to support this view.[5]
The wet nose, or rhinarium, is essential for determining the direction of the air current containing the smell. Cold receptors in the skin are sensitive to the cooling of the skin by evaporation of the moisture by air currents.[6]
Function and mechanism
A great part of a dog’s brain is dedicated to acquiring and interpreting odors, using its nose as a guide in sniffing in order to follow a trail. The animal performs a series of short inhalations and expirations, permitting it to bring the odor-bearing molecules in contact with its olfactory mucosa. These molecules are dissolved and then absorbed by cells of the olfactory epithelium before they reach neurons, which transmit information to the brain. Dogs with elongated noses perform better than dogs with a flat noses. Additionally, larger dogs have a better sense of smell than smaller dogs.[7]
A dog’s nose is significantly colder than its body temperature. This makes it more sensitive to thermal radiation. Dogs can thus detect even weak levels of warmth.[8]
Dogs are able to smell from birth and this sense develops during the first two weeks of their life. Dogs can also learn scents in the womb. Soon after birth, dogs use their sense of smell to recognize their mothers. A dog is also able to identify foods which its mother has ingested, having learned their smells before birth.[9]
When dogs sniff, they start by using only their right nostril. If they are comfortable with the smell, they then begin using their left nostril. This supports the theory that dogs process novel information using the right hemisphere of their brain, and the left for reacting to familiar situations. As dogs sniff, air travels along an upper and lower pathway. The lower pathway, where the majority of the air travels, leads to the lungs, while the upper pathway leads to olfactory receptors which detect scents. The lower pathway is also used for exhalation, allowing odor molecules to accumulate on the receptors.[10]
Use in communication
Scent is used extensively in canine communication. Dogs may sniff each other directly, or may communicate through chemical signals. In direct contact, male dogs focus more on the rear ends of the dog which they are sniffing, while females tend to sniff the head. When communicating through chemical signals, the most common form of communication is urine-marking. Dogs can detect different qualities in another dog’s urine, which may communicate information such as social status or sex.[10]
Comparison to humans
Dogs have vastly more powerful noses than humans. The typical dog’s nose is 100,000 to 1 million times as sensitive as a human’s, and the most sensitive breed, the bloodhound, has a sense of smell which can be up to 100 million times as sensitive. Additionally, dogs have much larger olfactory mucosa and a larger part of the brain dedicated to odors. Whereas in humans, 5% of the brain is dedicated to odors, in dogs this figure is 33%. Dogs can detect odors 9 orders of magnitude more faint than humans, who can detect odors up to 1 ppb.[9]: 30
Conditions affecting ability
Many factors can affect a dog’s ability to smell, including age, sex, breed, disease, diet and environmental conditions. As dogs grow older, their performance and ability to learn new smells is reduced. Male dogs have a keener sense of smell than female dogs during tracking when determining the direction of a scent trail.[11] A variety of diseases can decrease a dog’s sense of smell, such as canine distemper and nasal mites. Dogs have an enhanced sense of smell when fed a high-fat, low-protein diet. There are a number of theories for this.[9]: 31–32
Humidity improves a dog’s ability to detect scents, due to lingering odors trapped by water vapor and increased humidity within the dog’s nose. Higher temperatures increase the presence of odor molecules in the air, especially at the level of a dog’s nose, but kill bacteria useful in detecting scents and can decrease a dog’s ability to work.[9]: 87 [10]
Wind also has an effect on a dog’s sense of smell. Winds which are too low decrease effective range, while winds which are too high make detection difficult. The optimal range is 3 to 10 km/h.[9]: 88 Turbulence reduces a dog’s ability to track scents.[9]: 91
Humans learned to use dogs’ exceptional sense of smell, primarily for hunting but also, more recently, for diverse types of searches.[10][9]
Law enforcement
Many dogs are used by law enforcement officers (such as police or customs officers) to find or detect corpses, blood, explosives, illegal drugs, contraband electronics[12] or large amounts of money[13] which are hard to find or deliberately hidden. They may be transported to crime or accident scenes, usually seated at the back of an adapted law enforcement vehicle.[14] They may, alternatively, work at a fixed location, for example at a customs station or airport.
Rescue
Dogs have been used for search and rescue operations.
Detection of disease
Some studies have found that certain dogs are able to detect diseases among human beings, notably cancer. The British medical journal The Lancet, suggested for the first time in 1989 the use of dogs to detect cancer.[15]
Hunting dogs
Employed for various purposes in hound-hunting, the hunting dog is above all used for its tracking abilities, that is finding and sniffing out prey.
Truffle dogs
This type of dog has been trained and raised to find truffles buried in the ground.
Competitions
There are scent work trials available in multiple different countries, which test the dogs ability to find and indicate odours to the handler. The scents used in these classes, called target odors are:
Birch (Betula lenta)
Anise (Pimpinella anisum)
Clove (Eugenia caryophyllata)
Cypress (Cupressus sempevirens)
The American Kennel Club has 4 different search environments: Container, Interior, Exterior, Buried. There is also an advanced level, called detective for high-achieving dogs. In this level, the search includes a mix of all the search environments. [16]
Guy Fawkes night, on November 5th every year, is the commemoration of an ancient event. I can well remember the evening from long, long ago: crackling bonfires; groups of family and friends dressed up against the cold; the fireworks themselves, the rockets hurtling into the night; and more.
So, on this November 5th, here are more recollections.
First, WikiPedia.
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Guy Fawkes (/fɔːks/; 13 April 1570 – 31 January 1606),[a] also known as Guido Fawkes while fighting for the Spanish, was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. He was born and educated in York; his father died when Fawkes was eight years old, after which his mother married a recusant Catholic.
Fawkes converted to Catholicism and left for mainland Europe, where he fought for Catholic Spain in the Eighty Years’ War against Protestant Dutch reformers in the Low Countries. He travelled to Spain to seek support for a Catholic rebellion in England without success. He later met Thomas Wintour, with whom he returned to England. Wintour introduced him to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate King James Iand restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. The plotters leased an undercroft beneath the House of Lords; Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder that they stockpiled there. The authorities were prompted by an anonymous letter to search Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and they found Fawkes guarding the explosives. He was questioned and tortured over the next few days and confessed to wanting to blow up the House of Lords.
Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. However, at his execution on 31 January, he died when his neck was broken as he was hanged, with some sources claiming that he deliberately jumped to make this happen; he thus avoided the agony of his sentence. He became synonymous with the Gunpowder Plot, the failure of which has been commemorated in the UK as Guy Fawkes Night since 5 November 1605, when his effigy is traditionally burned on a bonfire, commonly accompanied by fireworks.
Then part of an item on PBS.
Guy Fawkes Day Explained
Every November 5th, Brits gather for bonfires, fireworks, and other festivities to mark Guy Fawkes Day. “Remember, remember! The fifth of November.” But what exactly is being celebrated? The holiday dates back more than 400 years to a failed plot to assassinate England’s King James I and blow up the House of Lords.
Then, finally, a video:
As John Wilson said in a comment a year ago (in the comments to the video):
Guy Fawkes – the only man, it is said, who entered the Houses of Parliament with honest intent.
Meet Lola: a loving rescue pup who knew something was wrong when it mattered most.
Back in 2025, team members at National Mill Dog Rescue saved Lola from a commercial breeding facility where she’d spent eight years confined to a small space with very little enrichment.
NATIONAL MILL DOG RESCUE
Given her difficult past, rescuers feared Lola might have a hard time adapting to rescue life. But Lola quickly proved them wrong.
“Despite everything she had experienced, Lola emerged as a happy, friendly little dog with so much love still to give,” a rescue representative told The Dodo.
A few months later, Lola met the Mullane family, and they instantly connected.
NATIONAL MILL DOG RESCUE
“From the moment they met her, Lola delighted them with her adorable little butt wiggle and radiant grin,” the representative said. “Choosing to bring her home was an easy decision for them. We were so happy to watch Lola head off to begin this next chapter of her life.”
About a year later, rescuers received an incredible update from Lola’s parents. According to a family member, Lola had been acting “funny,” lying on top of her grandpa and repeatedly nudging him, as if trying to signal that something was wrong.
Lola’s grandpa, who suffers from colon cancer, wasn’t feeling well, and he took Lola’s persistent nudges as a sign that he should go to the emergency room.
NATIONAL MILL DOG RESCUE
A few hours later, doctors confirmed that Lola’s grandpa was in kidney failure. Had he waited any longer, things could have been much worse.
“Lola may have saved his life that day,” National Mill Dog Rescue wrote in a Facebook post.
Rescuers are so proud of Lola, a dog who loves boldly, despite her years spent in solitude.
“We’re incredibly grateful for the role she has played — and continues to play — in the lives of the Mullane family,” the representative said. “They gave Lola a second chance, and in an extraordinary way, Lola was there when her family needed her most.”
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It has been said countless times before – dogs are beyond special. The bond they make with us humans is so beautiful, and this true story about Lola and the Mullane family is wonderful.
The Conversation Weekly podcast talked to Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, about his journey developing optogenetics and its potential to treat a wide range of neuropsychiatric conditions. What follows is an edited transcript of the podcast.
Take us back to the early 1990s. You’re training to be a doctor and you start a rotation working with psychiatric patients. What questions about the brain did that raise for you?
Both basic neuroscience (people asking how the brain works) and clinical neuroscience (doctors trying to help people with brain disorders) have faced a very similar problem, which is the brain is quite mysterious and quite hard to study.
It’s billions of fragile, transparent, very fast-acting cells, buried within the skull and doing very complex things. We don’t have a good model for how the brain works, unlike the heart, which is very obviously a pump. We don’t actually know what the brain’s trying to do.
A lot of neuropsychiatric treatments are not as effective as they could be, and developing new ideas has been hard. The treatments we had were not grounded in a solid understanding of the cells involved. What are the cells actually doing? What are they trying to do? This was a problem that held back treatment.
When I was in psychiatry training in the early 2000s, and also as a medical student in the late 1990s, I was very much impressed with the magnitude of the challenge.
You went on to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and then you set up a lab at Stanford trying to understand how to control particular cells in the brain. What were the first experiments you did?
I have a background in molecular biology, and I knew how to work with genes. So I was motivated to see if we could use genetics to make a treatment or an intervention that targets one kind of cell.
Every cell has genes that tell it what to do. Different cells in the brain, just as other parts of the body, can be genetically targeted because different cells have different jobs. A cell that is a dopamine neuron has all the machinery needed to make the hormone dopamine. It uses different genes than a cell that makes the hormone serotonin, so they can be distinguished from each other.
And so the thought was maybe I could have a way of controlling just the dopamine cells or just the serotonin cells by inserting a specific gene into them. But I didn’t know what would work well, so I tried inserting different types of genes into neurons.
Some of the genes I tried were quite conventional; they were genes from mammals that I thought might affect the activity of neurons. But one was a gene from a single-celled algae – a microbe that converts light to energy. This gene coded for a light-activated protein called channelrhodopsin-2 that Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel identified a few years earlier.
And I thought it was worth a try. It was the least likely to work, but why not try it?
And amazingly, that was the one that worked. The genes that were lower risk didn’t work, and this gene from a single-cell microbe actually did.
Walk us through what you did. You inserted the gene into rat cells, right?
I had a preparation of cultured rodent neurons in a dish – basically a 24-well plate that let me look at many different conditions at the same time in different wells of this plate. This let me test side by side the conventional mammalian genes and this gene from the algae.
So the first step was to get the genes into the cells. Then I exposed some plates of cells to light, while others I did not. I used a test to see which cells had activated.
When I looked across the cells in the screen, I found that the ones that had the algae gene and had gotten light were showing this marker of activation, whereas the others had a much lower signal. That was a really thrilling moment because it showed that this gene from a photosynthetic single-celled organism – almost as far as you can possibly be from mammals evolutionarily – was working beautifully in fragile mammalian neurons.
It was a moment of a lot of pressure and complexity, but also delight.
You went on to name your method optogenetics – the ability to control specific nerves using light in the brain – and you soon went on to using it to control living mice in various ways. What was it like in those first few years of working with live animals?
This was an experiment that was very visible and easy to understand. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and attention to the left side of the world. We put in a fiber optic into the right part of a mouse motor cortex – the part that controls movement – and when we flipped the switch, the mouse immediately began going left in circles.
And then as soon as we turned off the laser light, it stopped and just looked up at us, as if nothing had happened.
That, coupled with the first experiment – those were transcendent moments.
What changed in your understanding of the brain in the moment you were able to switch particular neurons on and off?
We understood that the technique would probably work to help us understand the brain better at that moment. And then we immediately started applying it to all sorts of different cells where things were mysterious – where nobody knew or couldn’t prove exactly what one cell type or another was doing in perception and cognition and action.
The general applicability became clear over the subsequent years.
Researchers are now using optogenetics in attempts to restore sight in people with visual impairment. How does that work?
In 2010, two of my colleagues in Europe were interested in delivering one of these light-activated proteins to human eye samples – specifically the retina of the eye – which worked very well.
So they did careful studies in monkeys and in people. And in 2021, just five years ago, they published a paper showing they could confer light sensitivity back to the retinas of a person who was completely blind from a neurodegenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa.
That’s what we call direct optogenetics. It’s somewhat complicated because you have to deliver the gene and light to the person.
Karl Deisseroth, left, and his wife, Michelle Monje-Deisseroth, were at home when they were notified of his Nobel win. AP Photo/Noah Berger
And going back to your psychiatric patients, who you still see in the clinic today, how do you hope optogenetics will be able to help them?
There’s a much easier and more broadly impactful avenue that we call indirect optogenetics, which uses the knowledge that comes from studying which cells matter in a symptom and then designing medications that target those cells. This is something we’ve really lacked in neuropsychiatry for a long time.
Indirect optogenetics is making strong headway for autism and schizophrenia. There are trials that are moving to their final stages for those disorders.
My particular clinical specialty is autism, and I see the difficulties that come with irritability and anxiety in these patients. And I can see optogenetics leading to new medications that will help.
An enzyme found in the brain could help to preserve cognitive resilience with advancing age, according to research in mice, humans and cells1.
Researchers found that high levels of the enzyme are linked to low levels of inflammation in the brains of aged mice. They also showed that the enzyme boosts the growth of neurons in ageing brains. The findings were reported on 15 October in Nature Neuroscience.
The enzyme seems to act “as a compensatory cognitive-resilience mechanism”, says study co-author Amar Sahay, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“This is a fantastic, very thoughtful approach to get at what could be protecting neurons,” says Timothy Hohman, a neuroscientist and geneticist at the Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer’s Center in Nashville, Tennessee, who was not involved in the study. “This is a great example of how you can use a model system to get at some of these resilience mechanisms that are super challenging to study in humans.”
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Maybe, just maybe, the workings of the human brain is not such a mystery as it used to be.
Here in Southern Oregon I look up at the birds in the sky, some flying solo, or with a few companions, some flying in larger groups. But I never reflect on birds that migrate.
The truth, that these small animals were traveling thousands of miles across the planet, must once have seemed just as improbable.
Then, in the early 1800s, dramatic evidence emerged supporting the theory of migration. White storks began appearing in Germany with African arrows embedded in their bodies. These birds became known as pfeilstörche, or “arrow storks.” They provided compelling evidence that birds disappearing from Europe were traveling all the way to Africa and back.
Almost two centuries later, scientists are still asking the same question, but our ability to answer it has been transformed.
For most of ornithological history, scientists understood migration through brief glimpses of a bird, a specimen collected somewhere else, or the rare instance of a banded bird recovered hundreds or thousands of miles from where it had been marked. From these fragments of intelligence, scientists reconstructed journeys that took place largely beyond their view.
Today, it’s possible to see the journeys themselves, almost in real time.
A century of following birds
Bird banding was the first tool used to attempt a systematic approach to connect these fragments of information. Since the early 1900s, researchers have placed uniquely numbered metal bands on birds and hoped someone, somewhere, would encounter them again.
Over the past quarter-century or so, the tools used to determine where birds go have changed dramatically.
Tracking devices can now be carried by increasingly smaller birds, recording their movements and communicating with land-based receivers or satellites orbiting the earth. Testing stable isotopes in feathers and other tissues can reveal where a bird originated. Genetic testing can distinguish populations.
Millions of observations by bird-watchers submitted to eBird, an online database to record the birds they see, show the distribution and abundance of birds across a continent throughout the year in ways early ornithologists could scarcely have imagined.
Collectively, these methods open an extraordinary new window into migratory birds and one of nature’s most remarkable behaviors: migration.
Burrowing owls breed in the Western U.S., raising their young in burrows often taken over from ground squirrels or prairie dogs. In winter, they migrate to Southwestern states, Mexico or Central America. John Anderton/The Atlas of North America’s Migratory Birds
Discovering unknown migrations
More than 70% of North American bird species are migratory. Yet scientists have known surprisingly little about where specific populations go.
A species like the American robin may breed across thousands of miles of North America, with different breeding populations migrating to entirely different places for the winter. Birds breeding in one part of the continent may travel one route and encounter one set of environmental conditions, while members of the same species experience a completely different set of conditions along another route.
These connections between where a bird breeds and where it spends the winter is called migratory connectivity. They are critical for understanding everything from the consequences of climate change on birds to how avian pathogens and diseases spread, to a species’ basic ecology.
We are ornithologists and conservation scientists who have spent almost 15 years along with a team of contributors compiling this rapidly expanding knowledge on bird movement into The Atlas of North America’s Migratory Birds. The atlas, being published on Nov. 3, 2026, by Princeton University Press, covers the latest information on seasonal movements for nearly 600 species and combines a century of bird-banding data with eBird observations, tracking studies, stable isotope testing, genetics and other sources of information.
What emerges is a picture of migratory birds that is both more complicated and more remarkable than the simple arrows pointing between breeding and wintering ranges on a map.
Consider the yellow-billed cuckoo. These birds breed over a wide range of the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. but migrate to a relatively small wintering area in the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina, Paraguay and southern Bolivia.
In contrast, peregrine falcons that breed in Alaska migrate almost directly south, dispersing across the Americas to wintering grounds that extend as far as southern South America.
Discoveries like these are accumulating rapidly. Collectively, they amount to a renaissance in our understanding of animal movement never before imagined.
Living masterpieces
The more clearly scientists can follow individual birds and populations across the planet, the more extraordinary these species can seem.
They navigate landscapes and respond to winds, weather, food and environmental conditions across enormous geographic scales.
The Atlas of North America’s Migratory Birds’ combines illustrations and maps to show where bird populations go when they migrate. Princeton University Press
We see these species and their migrations as among evolution’s great living masterpieces. That’s why we combined science with natural history and artist John Anderton’s extraordinary illustrations of the birds themselves. The maps allow us to see where birds travel, and the art brings the species to life.
Together, they make visible something that humans could only imagine for most of our history.
A map for conservation
North America has lost about 3 billion birds during the past half-century, and many migratory species continue to decline.
To understand why a population is declining and help save it, researchers need to understand the species’ entire annual cycle: its critical stopover habitats, wintering grounds and threats along its migration routes.
For much of the history of ornithology, scientists studied birds primarily during their breeding season. That made practical sense. Birds are conspicuous then – singing, defending territories, building nests and raising young.
But a migratory bird may spend only a few months of its life in its breeding grounds. Conditions such as weather, food availability and habitat quality encountered during migration can determine whether an individual survives to breed again.
All of this knowledge has accumulated because people value birds and have devoted enormous time and effort to understanding them.
For more than a century, thousands of bird-banders have woken up before the crack of dawn to set traps, carefully place bands on birds’ legs and release them, often knowing the chances of ever learning what happened to those individuals were exceedingly small.
More recently, tracking technology has allowed researchers to follow individual birds across continents and oceans. Those tracks exist because scientists, students, technicians and others have spent countless hours attaching and recovering tags, and contributing and sharing their data. https://www.youtube.com/embed/xfiY0tTjKxA?wmode=transparent&start=0 In this animation, Cornell’s Bird Lab traced the routes of 15 species using tracking signals. From tiny sensors to networks of humans with binoculars, efforts to understand migrations are helping to show where cruicial habitat can be preserved.
Today, millions of bird-watchers contribute observations that, thanks to advances in data science, allow us to watch migration unfold across an entire continent.
Scientists today know more about where migratory birds go, how populations are connected and what they encounter along the way than at any previous point in history. That knowledge is helping to identify where conservation efforts can make a difference for the future.
