Category: Science

Moments in history

You can blame John Zande for today’s post!

John left an intriguing question as a comment to yesterday’s post.

Oh to have a time machine!

Tell me, Paul, if you did have one, a time machine, what three moments in history would you visit?

It really grabbed Jean and me and we spent quite a few minutes during the day kicking around ideas. At first, it was easy just to do a web search on epic moments in history and see if any of them related to me. But that seemed too easy. So I have picked three that do connect with my life.

May 8th, 1945

I was born on November 8th, 1944. I was born in North London (Acton). It was the period of the Second World War when the V2 rockets were landing all around. Take, for example, the incident just eleven days after my birth, when on the 19th November, 1944 a V2 landed in Wandsworth causing much damage and many fatalities around Hazlehurst Road and Garratt Lane. Spend a moment reviewing who died, and their ages, in that bombing.

So I was precisely six months old when the armistice was announced on May 8th, 1945. As Wikipedia describes it:

Victory in Europe Day, generally known as V-E Day, VE Day or simply V Day was the public holiday celebrated on 8 May 1945 (7 May in Commonwealth realms) to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces.[1] It thus marked the end of World War II in Europe.

On 30 April, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader, committed suicide during the Battle of Berlin. Germany’s surrender, therefore, was authorised by his successor, Reichspräsident Karl Dönitz. The administration headed by Dönitz was known as the Flensburg Government. The act of military surrender was signed on 7 May in Reims, France and on 8 May in Berlin, Germany.

I would have loved to witness, by being in the crowd that day, the King and Queen acknowledging the end of the war in Europe.

tdih-may08-HD_still_624x352 — May 8, 1945: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, are joined by Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Nevertheless, that day in May, 1945 has been memorable for me for all of my life. Because my mother, who is still alive today, aged 96, (still living in London but spending Christmas with my sister in Cape Town, by the way), held me in her arms and said aloud: “My dear Paul, you are going to live!” I grew up with those loving words deeply rooted within me.

2. Stonehenge – too many moons ago!

For reasons that I am not entirely clear about, I have always been fascinated by the stars. From the point of view of using the stars to help me navigate strange parts of the world, both on land and at sea. I grew up regarding Polaris, the North Star, almost as a companion. Later in my life when sailing solo from Gibraltar to The Azores, a distance of just under 1,150 nautical miles, on a Tradewind 33 yacht, despite having an early GPS unit it was backup to me using a sextant to maintain (some) awareness of my position.

Tradewind 33 - Songbird of Kent. My home for five years. — Tradewind 33 – Songbird of Kent. My home for five years.

(Reminds me of a anecdote when I was crewing on a privately-owned East Coast Essex fishing smack. I was asking Bill, the owner, why he always laid his thumb on the position on the chart in response to the question, “Where are we?” Bill’s reply: “That’s as accurate as anyone can be!”)

In 1969, when I was driving across the desert plains of Australia, often with inhabited places more than a 150-mile radius away (the Simpson Desert especially coming to mind) the Southern Cross seemed to keep me grounded and remind me that I was making progress.

Back when I was living just outside Totnes in South Devon, my frequent drives up to London along the A303 took me past Stonehenge in Wiltshire.

The December solstice happens at the same instant for all of us, everywhere on Earth. This year the solstice occurs on Tuesday December 22nd at 04:49 GMT (Universal time) with the sun rising over Stonehenge in Wiltshire at 08:04.

THE EARLIEST MONUMENT

It is possible that features such as the Heel Stone and the low mound known as the North Barrow were early components of Stonehenge,[3] but the earliest known major event was the construction of a circular ditch with an inner and outer bank, built about 3000 BC. This enclosed an area about 100 metres in diameter, and had two entrances. It was an early form of henge monument.[4]

Within the bank and ditch were possibly some timber structures and set just inside the bank were 56 pits, known as the Aubrey Holes. There has been much debate about what stood in these holes: the consensus for many years has been that they held upright timber posts, but recently the idea has re-emerged that some of them may have held stones.[5]

Within and around the Aubrey Holes, and also in the ditch, people buried cremations. About 64 cremations have been found, and perhaps as many as 150 individuals were originally buried at Stonehenge, making it the largest late Neolithic cemetery in the British Isles.[6]

Taken from here.

I would have loved being present at Stonehenge when the builders finally were able to stand back and see the Sun “speak” to them at the first Solstice after that point in its construction.

It seems to me to be a most magical place yet Stonehenge offers a mathematical and rhythmic foundation to that magic.

3. First man into space – 12th April, 1961

It was, of course, Yuri Gagarin, who made the first complete orbit of Planet Earth in space.

I would have given anything to be in his seat (and suit). For to look out and see our planet as a small object in an enormous outer space would have to change one’s perception of almost everything; for evermore.

exo-planet-earth-from-space

My wish for the New Year is that we recognise our place both in history and on our Planet Earth, and care for it as the sole, beautiful home that we have.

Now that global recognition would be a moment in history that I would want to experience before I die!

(Thanks John for inspiring me to jot down these thoughts!)

Our Winter Solstice.

Is the moment of publishing this post.

I thought it would make a nice change to publish tomorrow’s post a little earlier than usual. To be precise to publish it on Dec. 22, at 04:48, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Or in our local Pacific Standard Time (PST) UTC-8 hrs or 20:48 Dec. 21., i.e. 20:48 on the evening of the 21st December. (I am seeing the exact time being declared as 04:48 or 04:49 UTC depending on what you read.)

Granted that the Northern Hemisphere tends to deliver the worst of the Winter weather after the shortest day, it still is good to know that for the next six months, the hours of daylight, in the Northern Hemisphere, will be increasing.

My inclination to write a post on the topic was greatly influenced by a most beautiful post over on Val Boyco’s blogsite. It was called And Winter Came. Here’s the video that Val included in her post.

Isn’t that a most beautiful few minutes!

Impossible to top that!

But I can continue including an informative item that was published over on Mother Nature News, and is republished here within the terms of MNN.

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8 things to know about the winter solstice

From when it happens to why, here’s your crash course on the shortest day of the year.

By: Melissa Breyer, December 18, 2015

Hello, winter. (Photo: psynovec/Shutterstock)

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night,” quipped Steve Martin – and indeed, even a day with less sunshine can feel a bit dark. Our world depends on the light radiating from that big star we traipse around, and when it’s in short supply, we feel it. But if you count yourself amongst those who don’t love waking up before the sun rises and getting off work after it has set, things are about to lighten up. Hello, winter solstice!

Although winter is really just beginning, we can at least say goodbye to these short little days we’ve been suffering (and don’t let the door hit you on the way out). With that in mind, here’s a collection of curious facts to celebrate the long-awaited return to longer days.

1. There are actually two winter solstices every year 

It’s sometimes easy to be hemisphere-o-centric, but the other side of the planet gets a winter solstice too. With the planet’s orbit tilted on its axis, Earth’s hemispheres swap who gets direct sun over the course of a year. Even though the Northern Hemisphere is closer to the sun during the winter, it’s the tilt away from the sun that causes cold temperatures and less light — which is when the Southern Hemisphere is toasty. So while our winter solstice is on Dec. 21 or 22, the Southern Hemisphere celebrates the same on June 21 or 22.

Here’s how that looks from space (kind of):

2. The winter solstice happens in the blink of an eye 

Although the solstice is marked by a whole day on the calendar, it’s actually just the brief moment when the sun is exactly over the Tropic of Capricorn that the event occurs.

3. Which is why it happens on different days in the same year

What? Yes! In 2015, the solstice happens on Dec. 22, at 04:49 on the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) time clock, the time standard that the world regulates its hours by. Which means any location that is at least five hours behind UTC should break out the party hats on Dec. 21. For example, in the United States the winter solstice happens on Dec. 21 at 11:49 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The rest of the time zones can welcome longer days beginning on the 22nd.

4. It’s the first day of winter … or it’s not, depending on whom you ask

Meteorologists consider the first day of winter to be Dec. 1, but ask an astronomer — or just about anyone else — and they’ll likely answer that the winter solstice marks the start of the season. There are two ways to look at it: meteorological seasons and astronomical seasons. Meteorological seasons are based on the annual temperature cycle, explains NOAA, while astronomical seasons are based on the position of the Earth in relation to the sun.

5. It’s a time of gloriously long shadows

Shadows are at their playful best on the solstice. (Photo: Mike Page/flickr)

If you’re inclined to take pleasure in the little things, like shadows that seem cast from a funhouse mirror, then the winter solstice is the time for you. It’s now that the sun is at its lowest arc across the sky and thus, shadows from its light are at their longest. (Imagine a flashlight directly above your head and one hitting you from the side, and picture the respective shadows.) And in fact, your noontime shadow on the solstice is the longest it will be all year. Relish those long legs while you can.

6. Full solstice moons are rarer than blue ones

Since 1793, the full moon has only occurred on the winter solstice 10 times, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. The last one was in 2010, which was also a lunar eclipse! The next full moon on a winter solstice won’t be until 2094.

7. There’s a Christmas connection

Since Christ wasn’t issued a birth certificate, there’s no record of the date when he was supposed to have been born. Meanwhile, humans have been celebrating the winter solstice throughout history — the Romans had their feast of Saturnalia, early German and Nordic pagans had their yuletide celebrations. Even Stonehenge has connections to the solstice. But eventually Christian leaders, endeavoring to attract pagans to their faith, added Christian meaning to these traditional festivals. Many Christmas customs, like the Christmas tree, can be directly traced to solstice celebrations.

8. It’s a reminder to thank Copernicus

Will the real Saint Nick please step forward? (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The word “solstice” comes from the Latin solstitium, meaning “point at which the sun stands still.” Since when has the sun ever moved?! Of course, before Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (aka “super smartypants”) came up with the ‘ol heliocentric model, we all figured that everything revolved around the Earth, sun included. Our continued use of the word “solstice” is a beautiful reminder of just how far we’ve come and provides a nice opportunity to give a tip of the hat to great thinkers who challenged the status quo.

And now go have some hot cocoa. Happy winter!

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Only one way to close. That is with this picture of the sun perfectly aligned with the stones at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, UK at the moment of the Winter Solstice.

Stay safe and warm wherever you are.

The next post from Learning from Dogs will be published at 00:00 PST Wednesday, 23rd December.

First puppies born through IVF.

There’s more to this than initially meets the eye.

I’m back to another ScienceAlert article although this story has been widely reported including by our local newspaper, the Grants Pass Daily Courier. This is about in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

Now I am sure that I share with countless others a poor understanding of what IVF is. Here’s a Wikipedia extract:

In vitro fertilization or fertilisation (IVF) is a process by which an egg is fertilised by sperm outside the body: in vitro (“in glass”). The process involves monitoring and stimulating a woman’s ovulatory process, removing an ovum or ova (egg or eggs) from the woman’s ovaries and letting sperm fertilise them in a liquid in a laboratory. The fertilised egg (zygote) is cultured for 2–6 days in a growth medium and is then implanted in the same or another woman’s uterus, with the intention of establishing a successful pregnancy.

Obviously that applies to women.

A quick web search revealed that the IVF procedure is commonly used in livestock. Here’s a graphic example of that (literally):

IVFProcedure

All of which leads nicely in to the Science Alert story.

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These are the world’s first puppies born through IVF

Cutest science ever.

PETER DOCKRILL 11 DEC 2015

The world’s first litter of puppies born through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) represents the culmination of decades of research and has resulted in seven adorable pups called Cannon, Red, Green, Cornelia, Buddy, Kiwi and Ivy le Fleur.

But the achievement goes beyond almost intolerable cuteness. The researchers say successfully breeding puppies via IVF opens the door for saving endangered canid species and using gene-editing techniques to eradicate heritable diseases in dogs.

“Since the mid–1970s, people have been trying to do this in a dog and have been unsuccessful,” said Alex Travis, a reproductive biologist from Cornell University.

To develop the litter of pups, the researchers had to fertilise eggs from donor mothers with sperm from donor fathers in the lab, before transferring the embryos to a host female. 19 embryos were transferred to the host female in total, who gave birth to seven healthy pups.

Two of the pups came from a beagle mother donor and a cocker spaniel father donor, and the other five came from two pairings of beagle mothers and fathers.

The team had to overcome a number of challenges to make the process work. Picking the right time to collect mature eggs from the female oviduct proved difficult, as dogs’ reproductive cycles occur only twice per year typically. The researchers found delaying the egg collection by one day resulted in greater fertilisation than previous attempts.

An additional barrier was preparing the sperm for fertilisation, which is normally performed by the female tract. But the researchers found they could simulate these conditions by adding magnesium to the cell culture. “We made those two changes, and now we achieve success in fertilisation rates at 80 to 90 percent,” said Travis.

The researchers’ IVF process, described in PLOS One, will enable conservationists to store the semen and eggs of endangered canids and also help protect rare dog breeds.

“We can freeze and bank sperm, and use it for artificial insemination,” said Travis. “We can also freeze oocytes, but in the absence of in vitro fertilisation, we couldn’t use them. Now we can use this technique to conserve the genetics of endangered species.”

The IVF process should also lead to better genome-editing techniques in the future. This issue is particularly pertinent in light of the way that humans have bred dogs over many centuries. With the paired selection of mates for desired traits leading to detrimental genetic baggage due to inbreeding, this gives researchers a chance to eliminate diseases that certain breeds are now predisposed to.

“With a combination of gene-editing techniques and IVF, we can potentially prevent genetic disease before it starts,” said Travis.

We don’t always hear a lot about endangered canid species, but here are five candidates that this research will helpfully be able to help sooner rather than later.

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If you are like me and rarely follow the links in online stories then let me alert you to the last one. It’s an article in Scientific American that opens, thus:

The 5 Most Endangered Canine Species
By John R. Platt on May 9, 2013

Domesticated dogs are some of the most popular animals on the planet, but their cousins in the wild aren’t always as beloved. For thousands of years humans have persecuted wolves, jackals, dingoes, foxes and other members of the family Canidae, pushing many species into or close to extinction. Here are five of the most endangered canine species and subspecies, three of which only continue to exist because a few people and organizations have taken extraordinary efforts to save them.

I don’t have copyright permission to offer more. So all I will do is to list the names of those five most endangered species:

The Ethiopian wolf
The Mexican gray wolf
The red wolf
Darwin’s fox
Island fox

Do go here and read the full article. And let’s not forget that our lovely dogs are not the full canine story.

Friendship between dogs.

A remarkable report about how dogs share.

Apologies for the short intro but my internet connection is still not 100% and I didn’t want to fuss around and lose the window in which to present this fascinating article on ScienceAlert sent to me by Dan Gomez.

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Dogs give food to their ‘friends’ in first-of-its-kind study

Treats for everybody! But more for pals.
PETER DOCKRILL 17 DEC 2015

Voluntary acts of kindness and positive outward gestures without thought of reward are two of the more redeeming aspects of human society, but to what extent do these prosocial behaviours exist in other animals?

A new study by researchers in Austria suggests that dogs are prosocial among their own kind too, with an experiment involving the voluntary offering of food between the animals showing that dogs also understand the concept of giving.

“Dogs and their nearest relatives, the wolves, exhibit social and cooperative behaviour, so there are grounds to assume that these animals also behave prosocially toward conspecifics,” said Friederike Range, an ethnologist at the Messerli Research Institute. “Additionally, over thousands of years of domestication, dogs were selected for special social skills.”

But measuring prosocial behaviour in dogs isn’t easy, says Range, because they’re so very social with humans. It can be difficult to tell between seemingly prosocial acts and behaviours that could actually just be the dog obediently reacting to cues and unintended communications from researchers.

So to take people out of the equation as much as possible, Range and his colleagues conducted an experiment where two dogs were set up by themselves in cages side by side. One of the dogs, called the donor dog, had the ability to extend one of two trays toward a receiver dog, using its mouth to pull on a string.

One of these trays contained a treat, while the other was empty. The dogs had been trained over weeks to understand how the tray-pulling system worked, and the donor dog in each instance knew that it would receive nothing itself if it gave the treat to its fellow canine (other than the pleasure perhaps of knowing it had done a kindness to its counterpart).

The researchers found that dogs, in the absence of any ulterior motive, do indeed exhibit prosocial behaviour, by voluntarily giving food to other dogs. But, having said that, they can be accused of preferential treatment.

“Dogs truly behave prosocially toward other dogs. That had never been experimentally demonstrated before,” said Range. “What we also found was that the degree of familiarity among the dogs further influenced this behaviour. Prosocial behaviour was exhibited less frequently toward unfamiliar dogs than toward familiar ones.”

In other words, dogs look out for their friends more than they do random strangers, but the same could be said of our own prosocial behaviour. Humans have the capacity for kindness, but we demonstrate it more frequently with those with which we are more familiar.

The findings are reported in Scientific Reports, but now that we know dogs are prosocial, that of course means there are other puzzles for the researchers to solve. Why do dogs act this way? Is it a result of domestication, their cognitive complexity, or has it been shaped by the species’ reliance on cooperative activities, such as foraging together? As dog lovers, we can’t wait to hear the answers.

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What amazing creatures they are!

New findings in self-awareness.

For dogs!

We humans take self-awareness for granted. The key measure, as I understand it, is our ability to recognise ourselves, as in a mirror or photograph, for example.

I have more than once mentioned in posts in this place, that the evolutionary journey for us humans and our canine companions has resulted in the two species now sharing a number of psychological and physical ailments.

But what has been implicitly understood is that the one thing that dogs and us do not share is self-awareness. Hitherto, it has been believed that dogs do not recognise themselves in the mirror test.

All of which is an introduction to an item that was recently posted on the ScienceAlert website and was brought to my attention by dear friend Dan Gomez.

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Dogs show signs of self-consciousness in new ‘sniff test’
We knew it!

BEC CREW 10 DEC 2015

Self-awareness might seem like the most basic part of life to us humans, but it’s a surprisingly rare concept when it comes to other animals. While great apes, dolphins, orcas, rhesus macaques, Eurasian magpies, and a single Asiatic elephant have all passed the self-recognition test, everything from pandas and pigeons to sea lions, gorillas, and several species of monkey have failed to show signs of consciousness.

Dogs were also on that list of failures – until now. Traditionally, self-consciousness is evaluated via the ‘mirror test’. If an animal uses its own reflection to examine or touch a red mark that’s been applied to its body without its knowledge, scientists can confirm that they possess some sense of self. But what if the animal isn’t that visually oriented?

“I believed that because dogs are much less sensitive to visual stimuli with respect to what, for example, humans and many apes are, it is likely that the failure of this and of other species in the mirror test is mainly due to the sensory modality chosen by the investigator to test the self-awareness and not, necessarily, to the absence of this latter,” says evolutionary biologist Roberto Cazzolla Gatti from Tomsk State University in Russia.

Gatti was prompted into this line of thinking by the fact that in past mirror tests, dogs have shown no interest in looking at their reflection in the mirror, but they will go ahead and sniff the area and possibly even urinate around it. While this got them a big old “fail” in previous studies, Gatti thought the behaviour warranted a closer look.

Back in 2001, renowned animal behaviour expert, Marc Bekoff, investigated the ‘mirror sniffing’ phenomenon via an experiment dubbed the ‘yellow snow test’. Yep it’s exactly what it sounds like. Over a five-year period, Bekoff took his dog Jethro on walks during the winter months, and timed how long he would sniff clumps of snow soaked in his own or other dogs’ urine.

The AnimalWise blog explains:

“Bekoff would wait until Jethro or other known female and male dogs urinated on snow, and then scoop up the clump of yellow snow as soon as Jethro was elsewhere and did not see him pick it up or move it (Bekoff used clean gloves each time and took other precautions to minimise odour and visual cues).

Bekoff then moved the yellow snow varying distances down the path so that Jethro would run across the displaced urine: (i) within about 10 seconds, (ii) between 10 and 120 seconds later, or (iii) between 120 and 300 seconds later. After Jethro arrived, Bekoff recorded how long he sniffed at the yellow snow, whether he urinated over it using the typical male raised-leg posture, and whether urination immediately followed the sniffing (‘scent marking’).”

Not surprisingly, Jethro paid a lot less attention to his own urine than he did to that of other dogs, so Bekoff concluded that his pet had to have some sense of self to be able to distinguish between scents. But with a sample size of one, the experiment wasn’t exactly going to set the scientific community on fire.

Gatti decided to come up with something a little more convincing. Called the Sniff Test of Self-Recognition (STSR), the experiment involved collecting urine samples from four stray dogs and systematically exposing them to the scents. He repeated this four times a year at the beginning of every season.

“I placed within a fence five urine samples containing the scent of each of the four dogs and a ‘blank sample’, filled only with cotton wool odourless,” he says. “The containers were then opened and each dog was individually introduced to the inside of the cage and allowed to freely move for 5 minutes. The time taken by each dog to sniff each sample was recorded.”

Just like Jethro, each dog spent way more time smelling the urine samples of other dogs than their own, which supports the hypothesis that they know their own scent and aren’t that interested in it. The result was stronger the older the dog, which suggests that self-awareness develops with age.

It might seem obvious that dogs would know their own scent, but if you’ve ever seen a dog bark at its own reflection, or completely ignore it – totally unaware of its own appearance and movements – you can see the significance.

“I demonstrated that even when applying it to multiple individuals living in groups and with different ages and sexes, this test provides significant evidence of self-awareness in dogs and can play a crucial role in showing that this capacity is not a specific feature of only great apes, humans, and a few other animals, but it depends on the way in which researchers try to verify it,” says Gatti.

The findings are published in the journal Ethology, Ecology and Evolution.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that sample size of four is pretty crap. And yep, it is, so we can’t really call this an official “pass” just yet. But the fact that we may well need to rethink the mirror test and figure out how to better align it with how certain species see the world is certainly worthy of a proper investigation. Certain behaviours such as empathy have been linked to self-awareness, and thanks to the ‘yawn test’, there’s evidence that dogs feel empathy towards their owners.

We’ll just have to wait and see if scientists are prepared to conduct a giant yellow snow test to put this conundrum to bed once and for all. In the meantime, here’s dolphins passing the mirror test adorably:

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Speaking of self-awareness, today, December 12th, is the centenary of the birth of Frank Sinatra.

Photo of Frank SINATRA, posed, c.early 1960s (Photo by GAB Archive/Redferns)

We want them to live forever!

Here’s an anti-aging project that we all wish for a successful outcome.

Despite the fact that one of the very important items that we learn from dogs is the certainty of death, there is not a single dog carer who doesn’t want them to live much longer lives.

Today’s post is the republication of a recent science report over on Mother Nature Network concerning a drug, rapamycin, that is hoped may give our wonderful dogs several more healthy years of life. As always, republished within the generous terms of MNN.

We wish the scientists much luck in achieving this outcome, without any deleterious side effects.

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Anti-aging project aims to extend dogs’ life spans

Researchers hope a drug called rapamycin can give dogs several more healthy years of life.
By: Russell McLendon, December 4, 2015,

Although some dogs have lived as long as 29 years, canine life spans are typically closer to half that length. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Living with a dog can help humans in lots of ways, from reducing stress and anxiety to lifting our spirits and making us laugh. Yet despite the abundance of benefits dogs offer, they also come with a notable drawback: Their life spans are much shorter than ours, forcing us to deal with the sadness of their deaths every 15 years or so.

Grieving for our dogs is just part of life, and in the big picture, it’s a small price to pay. But according to researchers at the University of Washington (UW), there may be a way to help our best friends stay with us — and stay healthy — a little longer.

Dog aging varies widely by size and breed, with smaller dogs typically maturing more quickly, yet also living a few years longer on average. It’s also common for mutts to outlive purebred dogs, thanks to the perks of higher genetic diversity. But while almost any dog is considered elderly by age 15, some have been known to nearly double their expected life spans — including Bluey, an Australian cattle dog who famously lived to see his 29th birthday last century.

And now researchers at UW’s Dog Aging Project (DAP) are working to bring similar longevity to canines of all kinds. In addition to performing “the first nationwide, large-scale longitudinal study of aging in pet dogs,” this project involves efforts to improve dogs’ “healthy life span” via therapies that already work in lab settings.

“To be clear, our goal is to extend the period of life in which dogs are healthy, not prolong the already difficult older years,” the project’s website explains. “Imagine what you could do with an additional two to five years with your beloved pet in the prime of his or her life. This is within our reach today.”

If it pans out, this may also aid ongoing research into extending the lives of other animals, including humans. But for now, the therapy is focused on dogs.

Researchers think rapamycin might increase a dog's healthy life span by up to 5 years. (Photo: Shutterstock) — Researchers think rapamycin might increase a dog’s healthy life span by up to 5 years. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Namely, they’re testing the FDA-approved drug rapamycin (aka sirolimus) on middle-aged dogs. High doses of rapamycin are already used in humans to fight cancer and prevent organ-transplant rejection, but at low doses, it has also been shown to slow aging and extend life span in several animals with few or no side effects. In mice, for example, the immunosuppressant can lengthen lives by up to 25 percent.

“If rapamycin has a similar effect in dogs — and it’s important to keep in mind we don’t know this yet — then a typical large dog could live 2 to 3 years longer, and a smaller dog might live 4 years longer,” the project’s organizers write. “More important than the extra years, however, is the improvement in overall health during aging that we expect rapamycin to provide.”

Rapamycin trials have already begun on 32 middle-aged golden retrievers, Labrador retrievers and German shepherds. Ranging from 6 to 9 years old, these dogs will spend several months on a low-dose rapamycin regimen in which researchers study age-related metrics like heart function, immune response, physical activity, body weight and cognitive measures. They’ll also follow these 32 dogs throughout the rest of their lives, looking for any significant changes in aging or life span.

And in phase two of the study, a second group of middle-aged dogs will enter a longer-term, low-dose rapamycin regimen “designed to optimize lifespan extension.” Based on mouse studies conducted both at UW and elsewhere, they anticipate the drug “could increase healthy lifespan of middle-aged dogs by 2-5 years or more.”

Rapamycin isn’t a miracle drug, however, and high doses have been linked to side effects like immune suppression and delayed wound healing. But as the DAP website argues, “these are greatly mitigated at the doses used to extend longevity, and both animal and human studies indicate that even mild adverse events are rare.”

Regular exercise and outdoor time are great ways to boost a dog's quality of life. (Photo: Shutterstock) — Regular exercise and outdoor time are great ways to boost a dog’s quality of life. (Photo: Shutterstock)

While the idea of extending dogs’ lives is exciting, it’s important not to let quantity of life overshadow quality of life. We may never have full control over how long our dogs live, but we can make sure they live well while they’re here.

A good reminder of this comes from Pegasus, a Great Dane rescued from unscrupulous breeders in South Africa when she was 4 weeks old. Suffering from a pigment deficiency often associated with blindness and deafness, Pegasus wasn’t expected to live very long. Filmmaker Dave Meinert adopted her anyway, and decided to film her daily as she grew up. In May 2015, he released a time-lapse movie (see below) of her reaching adulthood that quickly went viral. And as he explains in the video, Pegasus’ prognosis only helped the pair live every day like it was their last.

“I still don’t know how long she is going to live,” Meinert admits. “But right now is pretty great.”

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Watching the video offers the most beautiful, and powerful, reminder of the unconditional love that we can share with our dogs! What a gift they give us!

Wouldn’t we all love a few more years of happy and healthy life for our beloved dogs.

The power of dog’s spit!

What clues does your dog’s spit hold for human mental health?

This is not a spoof. Apparently the closeness of the relationship between dogs and humans holds real scientific value.

Just my way of introducing a most fascinating and interesting item that recently appeared on The Conversation blogsite. (And see my note at the end of today’s post.)

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What clues does your dog’s spit hold for human mental health?

December 2, 2015

Elixir Karlsson, Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology, University of Massachusetts Medical School

There goes some precious DNA…. Graeme Bird, CC BY-NC-ND

Dogs were the first animals people domesticated, long before the earliest human civilizations appeared. Today, tens of thousands of years later, dogs have an unusually close relationship with us. They share our homes and steal our hearts – and have even evolved to love us back. Sadly, they also suffer from many of the same difficult-to-treat psychiatric and neurological diseases we do.

I learned this firsthand about six years ago, when my sister Adria adopted Beskow, a beautiful,

Beskow, in fine spirits. Elinor Karlsson, CC BY-ND

boisterous, black and white mutt. Beskow became my constant companion on my morning runs along the Charles River. Her joy in running was obvious to everyone we passed, and she kept me going mile after mile.

When not running, though, Beskow suffered from constant anxiety that left her stressed and unhappy – on edge around other dogs and prone to aggressive behavior. Beskow had trouble even playing outdoors, since she was compelled to attend to every sound and movement. Working one-on-one with skilled behaviorists and trainers helped immensely, but poor Beskow still never seemed able to relax. Eventually, Adria combined the intensive training with medication, which finally seemed to give Beskow some relief.

Beskow’s personality – her intelligence, her focus and her anxiety – was shaped not only by her own life experiences, but by thousands of years of evolution. Have you ever known a dog who would retrieve the same ball over and over again, for hours on end? Or just wouldn’t stay out of the water? Or wasn’t interested in balls, or water, but just wanted to follow her nose? These dogs are the result of hundreds of generations of artificial selection by human beings. By favoring useful behaviors when breeding dogs, we made the genetic changes responsible more common in their gene pool.

When a particular genetic change rapidly rises in prevalence in a population, it leaves a “signature of selection” that we can detect by sequencing the DNA of many individuals from the population. Essentially, around a selected gene, we find a region of the genome where one particular pattern of DNA – the variant linked to the favored version of the gene – is far more common than any of the alternative patterns. The stronger the selection, the bigger this region, and the easier it is to detect this signature of selection.

In dogs, genes shaping behaviors purposely bred by humans are marked with large signatures of selection. It’s a bit like evolution is shining a spotlight on parts of the dog genome and saying, “Look here for interesting stuff!” To figure out exactly how a particular gene influences a dog’s behavior or health, though, we need lots more information.

To try to unravel these connections, my colleagues and I are launching a new citizen science research project we’re calling Darwin’s Dogs. Together with animal behavior experts, we’ve put together a series of short surveys about everything from diet (does your dog eat grass?) to behavior (is your dog a foot sitter?) to personality (is your dog aloof or friendly?).

Any dog can participate in Darwin’s Dogs, including purebred dogs, mixed breed dogs, and mutts of no particular breed – our study’s participants will be very genetically diverse. We’re combining new DNA sequencing technology, which can give us much more genetic information from each dog, with powerful new analysis methods that can control for diverse ancestry. By including all dogs, we hope to be able to do much larger studies, and home in quickly on the important genes and genetic variants.

A beagle considers making the saliva donation. Stephen Schaffner, CC BY-ND

Once an owner has filled out the survey, there’s a second, crucial step. We send an easy-to-use kit to collect a small dog saliva sample we can use for DNA analysis. There’s no cost, and we’ll share any information we find.

Our plan is to combine the genetic data from many dogs and look for changes in DNA that correlate with particular behaviors. It won’t be easy to match up DNA with an obsession with tennis balls, for instance. Behavior is a complex trait that relies on many genes. Simple Mendelian traits, like Beskow’s black and white coat, are controlled by a single gene which determines the observable characteristic. This kind of inherited trait is comparatively easy to map. Complex traits, on the other hand, may be shaped by tens or even hundreds of different genetic changes, each of which on its own only slightly alters the individual carrying it.

Adding to the complexity, environment often plays a big role. For example, Beskow may not have been as anxious if she’d lived with Adria from puppyhood, even though her genetics would be unchanged.

Darwin’s Dogs team member Jesse McClure extracts DNA from a sample. Elinor Karlsson, CC BY-ND

To succeed, we need a lot of dogs to sign up. Initially, we’re aiming to enroll 5,000 dogs. If successful, we’ll keep growing. With bigger sample sizes, we’ll be able to tackle even more complex biological puzzles.

This is a huge effort, but could offer huge rewards. By figuring out how a genetic change leads to a change in behavior, we can decipher neural pathways involved in psychiatric and neurological diseases shared between people and dogs. We already know these include not just anxiety, but also PTSD, OCD, autism spectrum disorders, phobias, narcolepsia, epilepsy, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Understanding the biology underlying a disease is the first step in developing more effective treatments – of both the canine and human variety. For example, genetic studies of narcolepsy in Doberman pinschers found the gene mutation causing the disease – but only in this one dog population. Researching the gene’s function, though, led to critical new insights into the molecular biology of sleep, and, eventually, to new treatment options for people suffering from this debilitating disease.

Darwin’s Dogs is investigating normal canine behaviors as well as diseases. We hypothesize that finding the small genetic changes that led to complex behaviors, like retrieving, or even personality characteristics, like playfulness, will help us figure out how brains work. We need this mechanistic understanding to design new, safe and more effective therapies for psychiatric diseases.

And Beskow? Six years later, she is as wonderful as ever. While still anxious some of the time, the

Beskow with one of her loving family members. Adria Karlsson, CC BY-ND

medication and training have paid off, and she enjoys her daily walks, training and playtime. She still gets very nervous around other dogs, but is a gentle, playful companion for my sister’s three young children.

We are now sequencing her genome. In the next few months, we should have our first glimpse into Beskow’s ancestry. We know she is a natural herder, so we’re curious to find out how much her genome matches up to herding breeds, and which genes are in that part of the genome.

Of course, we can’t figure out much from just one dog – if you are a dog owner, please enroll your dog today!

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This is an incredibly interest research project with far-reaching implications for us humans. I have written to Professor Karlsson to double-check that anyone who reads this can participate, even if living outside the USA, and will update this post as soon as I hear back from her.

Do share this as far and wide as you can for the benefits for us humans are clear and obvious.

Not a week goes by without me gaining more and deeper understanding of just how wonderful and fabulous our dogs are.

These extraordinary minds of ours.

Serendipity at work.

Chapter 8 of my book is entitled: Behaviours and Relationships. It opens thus:

“It is all to do with relationships.”

I heard this many years before the idea of writing this book came to me. Heard it from J, who was referred to in the previous chapter. J was speaking of what makes for happy people in all walks of life. It’s one of those remarks that initially comes over as such an obvious statement, akin to water being wet or the night being dark, that it is easy to miss the incredible depth of meaning behind those seven words.

Humans are fascinating. Every aspect of who we are can be seen in our relationships. How we relate to people around us, whether it be a thirty-second exchange with a stranger or a long natter with friends whom we have known for decades, including our partners and family relations. The core relationship, of course, the relationship that drives so many of our behaviours is the relationship that we have with ourself. That being rooted in our relationship experiences with the adults around us when we were young people.

When one looks at the performance of successful companies one often sees, nay one always sees, people being valued. The directors and managers of those companies understand that if people are valued then a myriad of benefits flow from that approach to relationships. Moving out of the workplace, the relationships that people have are always stronger and happier if those individual persons know they are valued. Moving beyond people, our dogs, and many other animals, are always stronger and happier if they feel valued. It’s the difference between empathy and sympathy.

Recently over on Mother Nature Network there was an essay presented by Russell McLendon who is science editor for MNN. It is about happiness.

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Happiness is all in your head

Scientists say they’ve found where happiness happens in the brain. What does that mean?

By: Russell McLendon, November 24, 2015

Understanding how our brains generate happiness could help make it less elusive, researchers say. (Photo: Andrew Vargas/Flickr)

Everyone wants to be happy. Yet despite all our efforts in pursuit of this prized emotion, it can be a surprisingly nebulous goal. What is “happiness,” exactly?

That question has puzzled philosophers for thousands of years, and it’s still tricky for anyone to tackle. But recent advances in neuroscience have finally begun to shed light on it, and now a new study claims to have found an answer. Being told happiness is “all in your head” may seem both obvious and dismissive, but in this case the specifics are also empowering. The more we know about how (and where) happiness happens, the less helpless we’ll be to summon it when we need it.

By comparing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with questionnaires about emotional states, researchers from Kyoto University in Japan say they’ve traced the experience of happiness to a specific part of the human brain. Overall happiness, they conclude, occurs when positive emotions combine with a sense of life satisfaction in the precuneus, a region of the medial parietal lobe that’s linked to important brain tasks like episodic memory, self-reflection and consciousness.

Psychologists already distinguish between broad life satisfaction and “subjective well-being,” since happiness often seems to fade during bad moods without necessarily plunging us into deeper existential despair. But by revealing the neural mechanics of how these feelings combine to create overall happiness, the authors of the new study hope to make it easier to objectively quantify this mysterious and elusive emotion.

“Over history, many eminent scholars like Aristotle have contemplated what happiness is,” lead author Wataru Sato says in a press release. “I’m very happy that we now know more about what it means to be happy.”

Scientists used MRI brain scans to identify happiness in a brain region known as the precuneus. (Photo: Kyoto University)

To pinpoint the location of happiness, Sato and his colleagues first used MRI to scan the brains of their study subjects. Those participants then took a survey, which asked about their general sense of happiness, the intensity of their emotions and the degree of their overall life satisfaction.

After analyzing the data, the researchers discovered that those who scored higher on the happiness survey also had more gray matter mass in the precuneus. That means this brain region is larger in people who feel happiness more intensely, feel sadness less intensely and who are better able to find meaning in life.

“To our knowledge, our study is the first to show that the precuneus is associated with subjective happiness,” the researchers write in the journal Scientific Reports.

Complex phenomena like happiness rarely boil down to a single brain region, but other recent research also points to an outsized role for the precuneus. A study published this month links impaired connectivity in the precuneus to depression, for example, and a 2014 study suggests the region is a “distinct hub” in the brain’s default-mode network, which is active during self-reflection and daydreaming.

All this may seem like an esoteric quest for neuroscientists, but it’s about more than just academic curiosity. By knowing which parts of the human brain generate our sensation of happiness, we might develop more accurate ways to test methods of becoming happier, like travel, exercise or meditation.

“Several studies have shown that meditation increases grey matter mass in the precuneus,” Sato says. “This new insight on where happiness happens in the brain will be useful for developing happiness programs based on scientific research.”

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It’s an unscientific opinion from me but I truly believe that humans have a bias towards happiness. And if there’s one animal that we can learn happiness from, it’s the dog!

Feeding our furry friends.

An insight into the eating behaviours of cats and dogs.

As it happens, Jean and I are vegetarians; Jean going way back in years to when she first turned away from meat. Thus the only meat that we purchase is from Cartwrights’, a local butcher in Grants Pass, where we buy hearts and liver for the dogs. The cats are fed on dried cat biscuits and canned cat food.

All owners of cats and dogs know that they have very different eating habits, and behaviours.

So to put some flesh on the bone, so to speak, about the eating behaviours of cats and dogs I am going to republish a recent essay that appeared over on The Conversation. As always, it is republished within the terms of The Conversation.

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Why cats are fussy eaters but dogs will consume almost anything

by Hannah Rowland, Lecturer in Ecology and Evolution & Research Fellow at Zoological Society of London, University of Cambridge

November 13, 2015

Anyone who’s watched a cat throwing up after munching on grass knows that our feline friends aren’t natural plant eaters. So you might be surprised to discover that these carnivorous animals share some important genes that are more typically associated with herbivores. And this might help explain why cats aren’t always easy to please when it comes to food.

New research suggests that cats possess the genes that protect vegetarian animals from ingesting poisonous plants by giving them the ability to taste bitter. Animals use their sense of taste to detect whether a potential food is nutritious or harmful. A sweet taste signals the presence of sugars, an important source of energy. A bitter taste, on the other hand, evolved as a defence mechanism against harmful toxins commonly found in plants and unripe fruits.

Evolution has repeatedly tweaked animals’ taste buds to suit various dietary needs. Changes in an animal’s diet can eliminate the need to sense certain chemicals in food, and so receptor genes mutate, destroying their ability to make a working protein.

I can haz chlorophyll. Lisa Sympson/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

One example of this comes from strictly meat-eating cats, who can no longer taste sweetness. But if bitter detection evolved to warn of plant toxins, then it stands to reason that cats, which (usually) eschew plants, shouldn’t be able to taste bitter either. Humans and other vegetable-munching animals can taste bitter because we possess bitter taste receptor genes. If cats have lost the ability to taste bitterness, we should find that their receptor genes are riddled with mutations.

Geneticists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia scoured the genome of cats and other carnivorous mammals like dogs, ferrets, and polar bears to see if our carnivorous cousins have bitter genes. They were surprised to find that cats have 12 different genes for bitter taste. Dogs, ferrets, and polar bears are equally well endowed. So, if meat eating animals are unlikely to encounter any bitter morsels, why do they boast genes for tasting bitterness?

Taste test

To find out, Peihua Jiang, a molecular biologist at Monell, put cat taste buds to the test. He inserted the cat taste receptor gene into human tissue cells in the lab. When combined, the cell and the gene act as a taste receptor that responds to chemicals dropped onto it.

Jiang discovered that the cat’s taste receptors responded to bitter chemicals found in toxic plants and to compounds that also activate human bitter receptors. The cat bitter taste receptor, known as Tas2r2, responded to the chemical denatonium benzoate, a bitter substance commonly smeared on the fingernails of nail-biting children.

So why have cats retained the ability to detect bitter tastes? Domestic cats owners know how unpredictable cats’ dietary choices can be. Some of the “presents” cats bring to their owners include frogs, toads, and other animals that can contain bitter and toxic compounds in their skin and bodies. Jiang’s results show that bitter receptors empower cats to detect these potential toxins, giving them the ability to reject noxious foods and avoid poisoning.

Hair of the dog. Michal Hrabovec/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

But how often do meat-loving cats actually get exposed to bitter and toxic compounds in their diet, compared with the plethora of plant toxins that their vegetarian counterparts have to contend with? Jiang suggests this is not enough to explain why cats have retained such an arsenal of receptors.

Instead, cat taste receptors may have evolved for reasons other than taste. In humans, bitter taste receptors are found not only in the mouth, but also in the heart and in the lungs, where they are thought to detect infections. It remains to be seen if feline bitter receptor genes also double-up as disease detectors.

The discovery of feline bitter receptors might explain why cats have got a reputation as picky eaters. But their unfussy canine counterparts have a similar number of bitter taste receptors – so why are cats so finicky? One answer might lie in how the cat receptors detect bitter-tasting compounds. Research published earlier this year by another team of researchers showed that some of the cat taste receptors are especially sensitive to bitter compounds, and even more sensitive to denatonium than the same receptor in humans.

Perhaps cats are also more sensitive to bitter chemicals than dogs, or they may detect a greater number of bitter compounds in their everyday diet. Food that tastes bland to us or to a dog could be an unpleasant gastronomic experience for cats. So rather than branding cats as picky, perhaps we should think of them as discerning feline foodies.

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Once again, I find it wonderful and incredible that there is so much knowledge and experience “out there” and how quickly a few clicks of a computer mouse can make it available to all of you wonderful readers!

And with that, it’s time to go off and feed the dogs. (Only showing off – Jean is the one who feeds both our dogs and our cats!)

Speaking of Jean – it’s her birthday today!

Picture parade one hundred and twenty-four

More than a photograph, less than a film!

Enjoy these for today’s picture parade:

Published on Nov 6, 2015
Another try at a slow motion video of Abbey shaking the water off after a bath

Published on Apr 24, 2014
Stunning, Perfection, Breathtaking – just a few words that describe this 3 minute surfing clip that shows Ian Walsh catching huge waves and making it look effortless.

Well over two million viewings.

Music: Versailles
Warner // Chappell Production Music

Published on Oct 22, 2014

This is a clip from our movie “THE SECRET LIFE OF TREES”.
More on www.homan.pl

That homan.pl web link is well worth a visit – stunning stuff!

Finally, back to slow animal shakes! (And I must acknowledge Mother Nature News for the idea for today’s picture parade.)

Published on Mar 21, 2013
Why do wet furry mammals shake? Si and Sam give some of their favourite animals a shower to uncover the science behind the ‘wet dog shake’. Sam caught up with Andrew Dickerson from Georgia Institute of Technology to find out more about the science… we’ll have the full interview for you soon.

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Taste test

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