Posts Tagged ‘dogs’
Slow-Motion Video: A Puppy Being Adorable
Seamus the puppy shows what a good boy he is! Isn't Seamus a good boy?
For this week's movie, we turned to the staff of the paper edition of Popular Science for help. That's right: this cuddly puppy is the Deputy Editor of the magazine.
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In this video, see him drinking water AND rolling over -- two critical skills, performed with fuzzy aplomb for your enjoyment.
In 2008, Popular Science named Vision Research's Phantom V12 slow-motion video camera one of the . This summer, we drove out to the headquarters of Vision Research in New Jersey to talk to the Phantom folks, see firsthand how the cameras are manufactured -- and ultimately borrow a camera to really get a feel for how it works.
We took the v641 for a bit of a spin, shooting a series of delightful slow motion videos of subjects including , knives slicing through fruit, and . All of these will be posted for your delectation, on a .
Dogs Can Reliably Sniff Out Lung Cancer, German Study Shows
This is a breakthrough for lung cancer researchers who have been trying to figure out if there are specific volatile organic compounds associated with the presence of the disease. The dog study suggests that there are.
Researchers at Schillerhoehe Hospital in Germany worked with specially trained dogs who were asked to smell the breath of 220 volunteers. The group included healthy patients, as well as people with lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The dogs correctly identified 71 positive lung cancer samples out of a possible 100, the researchers write in the European Respiratory Journal. They also correctly identified 372 non-cancerous samples out of a possible 400.
What’s interesting about this is that the dogs were able to detect cancer even in the presence of other factors, like tobacco smoke and COPD. Current lab tests for lung cancer can't do this. This suggests that there is indeed a VOC associated directly with lung cancer, which can be detected — at least by a dog — even in the presence of other compounds.
VOCs are emitted from the surface of cells as they undergo tumor-induced gene and protein changes. Identifying the VOCs that certain cells make can go a long way toward early diagnosis, when a scan might not be able to detect anything.
Other researchers have been working on lab chips that can make the same diagnosis, without using dogs. Israeli researchers reported last year that their could differentiate among lung, breast, prostate and colon cancer — by differentiating among the VOCs.
But as we’ve seen before, sometimes dogs are simply the best sniffing technology out there. The after spending billions of dollars on research. This new study suggests that doctors may be learning the same thing.
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Slow-Motion X-Ray Video Reveals the Slurpy Mechanics of Dogs’ Drinking
It’s amazing with a high-frame-rate X-ray camera, a cup of beef broth, and a Portuguese water dog. For instance, we knew that dogs are obnoxious drinkers, but we didn’t realize that rather than scooping liquids into their mouths with the undersides of their tongues, they actually tap a trick of fluid mechanics--just as cats do--to pull columns of water from the water bowl into their mouths.
Thanks to evolutionary biologist Alfred Crompton and some Harvard colleagues, now we know. Crompton’s study of the mechanics of canine drinking published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Biology Letters, and included are the videos seen above and, in X-ray, below. The videos and complementing study show that, contrary to conventional thought on the matter, dogs drink exactly like cats.
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While dogs do pick up a certain amount of water by curling the undersides of their tongues, most of that ends up back in the bowl (or elsewhere). Rather, the flattened tongue barely nicks the surface of the water before snapping back, and when it does so it manages to pull a column of liquid into the air behind it--a column that the canine can then bite down on almost as it would a solid.
It actually takes three or four laps for the dog to work the water along its tongue and the roof of its mouth and into the throat. Which might explain why it seems like that last lap always ends up all over the floor.
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New Remote System Lets Handlers Guide Their Dogs From Afar
A specially-designed harness fitted with GPS sensors, a CPU, and a wireless modem connects with a base computer that human handlers can use to keep track of the canine and issue commands. The harness vibrates on the left and right sides and issues tones that the dog recognizes as commands, allowing the handler to guide the dog remotely.
But the dog isn’t the only element of the system that requires training. The software behind the system is trained in the canine’s thought processes as well, taking the animal’s natural inclinations into account. In this way, the system isn’t just a means for handlers to issue hard commands; the handler can determine an objective or a destination for the dog, but the software takes into account the dog’s innate capabilities and sensibilities to help it get to its destination accurately.
In trials, the computer issued correct commands 99 percent of the time and a trained yellow lab followed those commands accurately 80 percent of the time (in the dog’s defense, computers often perform more accurately than humans as well).
The system has myriad law enforcement, first responder, and military applications (no word yet on what the tactical version might look like) because it allows handlers to maintain remote contact with their animals without maintaining a line of sight, allowing the dogs to operate in areas deemed to dangerous for humans. But by computerizing the communications between animal and handler, the system will also generate a lot of data about the animals themselves and the way the respond to certain tasks and commands. That in turn should help both handlers and the software improve the ways they communicate with canines.
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Video: Smartest Dog Ever Can Pick Out 1,022 Toys By Name
A border collie named Chaser has learned the names of — more than any other animal, even the legendary Alex the parrot.
Psychologists Alliston Reid and John Pilley of Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., wanted to test if there was a limit to the amount of words a border collie could learn, so they taught Chaser the names of 1,022 toys, one by one, for three years. New Scientist reports that they got her to fetch the toy and then they repeated the name to reinforce her understanding.
They regularly tested her on her vocabulary by putting random groups of 20 toys in another room and having her fetch them by name. Chaser, now 6, never got less than 18 out of 20 right, in 838 (!) separate tests over three years.
It takes 16 plastic tubs to hold all the toys.
Watch Pilley give Chaser some impressively complex commands — combining three verbs with three nouns — in the video below. She understands the verbs “nose,” “get” and “paw.” Her reward is playtime with “Blue,” a little ball she chases across the room. For a whole collection of Chaser videos, .
She learned common nouns that represented categories, such as “ball,” and she learned to infer the names of objects by their association with other objects.
Rico the border collie, from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, was previously top dog — he had a vocabulary of about 200 words. Chaser’s feats are chronicled in the journal .
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After $19 Billion Spent Over Six Years, Pentagon Realizes the Best Bomb Detector Is a Dog
The Pentagon's best (and best-funded) engineers have toiled for years, only to realize the supremacy of the canine schnoz
The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO (the Pentagon should really take a page from DARPA and make catchier acronyms) has been working on this problem for years, but it's only getting more serious. There have been more roadside bombs in Afghanistan in the first eight months of this year than in the same period in 2009, so the work JIEDDO is doing is under extra scrutiny.
That made it even more embarrassing when the director of the organization told a conference yesterday that "Dogs are the best detectors." As it turns out, the most sophisticated detectors JIEDDO could come up with tend to locate only 50% of IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq. When soldiers are accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs, that number goes up to 80%. That director, Lieutenant General Michael Oates, told the conference that his organization now focuses on disrupting the use of IEDs, rather than flat-out detecting them...because they haven't make all that much progress on the detection front.
Instead of detection, JIEDDO now spends money on drones to find those planting IEDs, radio jammers to screw with the frequencies used to detonate the bombs, and lots of aerial sensors to scan bomb-heavy areas. That's all useful, but Congress has recently shown a lack of confidence in the group's accomplishments, its focus, and in the way its funds are being spent. In response, the House Armed Services Committee cut the group's budget by nearly half a billion dollars--which, as it turns out, can train a whole lot of bomb-sniffing dogs, or at least buy some sweet dog armor.
[Wired]
Dog Poo Powers a Streetlight In Massachusetts Park
The Park Spark methane digester, unveiled this week, only powers a streetlight for now — no poop-powered popcorn yet. But it’s a neat concept: Replace trash cans with a public methane digester, and you demonstrate how simple it can be to turn waste into fuel.
“As long as people own pets in the city and throw away dog waste, the production of energy will be continuous and unlimited,” the project’s Web site says.
The project involves three basic steps: Throw your dog’s waste into the digester, where anaerobic bacteria are ready to break it down. Stir the mixture to help methane rise to the top, and burn the methane to generate light or electricity.
After picking up their dogs' waste in biodegradable bags, visitors to the Park Spark digester can feed the waste through an above-ground tube, and stir it with a hand crank. The bacteria container is buried underground and the methane is piped through the ground to the streetlamp, which burns with an eternal flame. Eventually, the project leaders want to use dog-generated methane to power vendor carts selling human food.
Conceptual artist Matthew Mazzotta came up with the idea, which is partially funded by MIT.
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