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Studies Illuminate Just How Well Dogs Understand Human Emotions
Do Dogs Really Understand What we Feel?
According to the data collected and presented, dogs are able to perceive human emotions through the comprehension of auditory and visual cues. Seventeen dogs of various breeds were exposed to stimuli and had their reactions observed by researchers. The stimuli was a series of both human and dog faces paired with acoustic information that denoted either positive or negative emotions. Two screens were utilized and the dogs were shown different combinations of stimuli in twenty trials, with both negative and positive visual information along with negative or positive vocalizations. A control group of neutral auditory information was also utilized. The dogs were exposed to each pairing of stimuli for five seconds and data for those stimuli where their attention was held for more than half that time was collected. Congruence was measured for how much the face shown aligned with the emotion emitted by the vocalization.
It was found that the dogs preferred the more congruent stimuli over fifty percent more than the incongruent stimuli. The dogs looked much longer at the faces that matched the emotion of the auditory stimulus more closely. The dogs appeared more sensitive and reacted more strongly to the emotions of other dogs depicted compared to humans. They did not appear to have preference for positive or negative stimuli and sex did not seem to have an effect on how the subjects reacted.
This study presents some compelling evidence that dogs have at least a rudimentary understanding of emotional categorization of humans and other dogs. They were able to discern between positive and negative emotional content through both auditory and visual information. They were not familiarized with the content of the stimuli beforehand so it is possible their reactions were an innate response.
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Physicists flip particle accelerator setup to gain a clearer view of atomic nuclei
Shooting beams of ions at proton clouds may help researchers map the inner workings of neutron stars. Physicists
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Shanidar 1, one of the unluckiest Neanderthals ever discovered, over his lifetime had suffered a serious blow to his face, multiple fractures, deafness, a degenerative condition and even had his arm amputated at the elbow – yet lived into his 40s – likely relying on the help of others.
Shanidar 1 was discovered in 1957 within the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. New analyses of the remains have uncovered the extent of Shanidar 1’s injuries over life. Perhaps most spectacularly, bony growths within the Neanderthal’s ear canals would have resulted in hearing loss.
A crushing blow to the head at a young age shattered Shanidar 1’s orbit which would have left him partially or totally blind in one eye, likely also contributing to developmental brain issues. He also suffered from a degenerative disease of the right side of his body, where his right humerus as well as other portions of his legs and feet were found to be withered and underdeveloped. On top of that, he sustained two broken legs, which would have created additional difficulties in walking.
Lastly, this arm injury likely resulted in the loss of use of his right hand and overall degeneration. The bottom end of the humerus has sharp edges that looks as if it had been amputated, which in itself could’ve created nerve damage down the right side of his body.
Crucially, all of these extensive injuries had healed long before death, not only showing some of the earliest hominid examples of surgery, but also demonstrating the rich societal networks Neanderthals may have had. It was extremely unlikely that Shanidar 1 could have provided for his society in any way, and yet likely received a large amount of care to live as healthily as possible, into his 40’s, after these significant injuries.
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Wednesday was the day astronomers said goodbye to the old Milky Way they had known and loved and hello to a new view of our home galaxy.
A European Space Agency mission called Gaia just released a long-awaited treasure trove of data: precise measurements of 1.7 billion stars.
It’s unprecedented for scientists to know the exact brightness, distances, motions and colors of more than a billion stars. The information will yield the best three-dimensional map of our galaxy ever.
You Are Here: Scientists Unveil Precise Map Of More Than A Billion Stars
Photo: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
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I had difficulty recognizing C when she arrived.
We had agreed to meet at the on-campus burger joint and I was early. Sitting in a booth in the corner, I finished up some statistics homework as well as the last of my coffee, and although I expected C at any moment, I was nevertheless startled when she peered over my shoulder, an enthusiastic grin painted on her face.
“Hi!” she chirped cheerfully, wrapping an arm around me. I returned the hug hesitantly, partly because I was in the awkward position of sitting while she was standing, but also because it had not yet registered to me that this was, in fact, C - the very person I had been waiting for.
She slid into the seat across from me and we launched immediately into comfortable conversation, exchanging pleasant greetings, and speaking to one another with a familiar ease I had not expected. We might as well have been meeting up after two weeks, when in actuality, it was nearly two years since we last spoke.
She was wearing a sunny yellow top and had her hair tied up sloppily on top of her head, revealing a pale face with large, doe eyes and a friendly disposition. I entertained the idea that her lack of makeup was what caught me off guard and explained my difficulty in immediately recognizing her but I quickly dismissed this theory as absurd; we had once been living together, after all, so her bare face could not feasibly be considered an unfamiliar sight for me.
She apologized profusely for her inability to meet up with me for the interview on two previous occasions and I assured her it was not a problem. We lamented the difficulties of school life, such as busy schedules, relentless deadlines, and the general fatigue that accompanies the Sisyphean struggle of adulthood. She complained about how much time her job took out of her day. I complained about how the lack of a job left too much time in mine. We both agreed that we could not decide if we were grateful for the looming shadow of graduation on the horizon or not; did it promise much-needed reprieve or threaten even greater distress?
I remembered when C and I had first met, moving into our dorm in late September four years ago. After a few lazy and unsuccessful attempts at unpacking, the two of us decided to seek out cold drinks at the neighboring dormitory building, Lothian, in a desperate attempt for relief from the encroaching heat. To our chagrin, we were hopelessly lost within a matter of minutes and were left wandering in circles around the campus, the sun attacking us the whole while as if driven by a personal vendetta. The two of us trudging across the fields, full of regret, must have been a funny sight, only exacerbated by the fact that we looked to be complete opposites of one another; she pale and I tan, she short and I tall, her hair a sleek curtain that brushed her shoulders, mine waist-length and frizzy. I was average-sized but she was very, very thin.
“When did it start?”
I finally worked up the courage to begin the interview. I felt I was being invasive despite her insistence that she was perfectly happy helping me with my assignment. We had spoken about this subject many times before, but something about the academic lens I was peering through felt disrespectful somehow. Almost alienating.
“In hindsight,” she said thoughtfully, “it started when I was fifteen years old. I . . . stopped finishing my dinner.”
C claimed she had always had a large appetite growing up, that she always cleaned her plate. But as her sophomore year of highschool approached, she had fallen into an insidious routine - she made sure to always leave a little bit of food behind, to never completely finish a meal. An innocent enough habit, or so she thought at the time.
“It spiralled out of control from there?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
C nodded. She related her actions from that time in her life the way one might analyze the motives and psyche of a fictional character, like she was discussing the mental health of someone else. She had a great deal to say, but her voice and manner did not betray even the slightest hint of anguish at being reminded of her troubled past.
“The eating disorder takes control of everything it can,” she said wisely.
Anorexia, in C’s experience, was not something she felt she was “suffering” from as she underwent its horrors. She was not punishing herself by not eating, it was quite the opposite. Not eating made her feel better. Invincible, even.
“I felt superhuman,” she explained. “I felt like I was honing a skill and it made me feel good about myself, that I could go to school and handle all these things in my life without needing food. It was an accomplishment.” She paused for a moment. “Really says a lot about how our culture conditions teenage girls, huh?”
We both sighed with tacit understanding.
“What if you ate more than you intended?” I asked. I tried to hide my discomfort about the whole conversation. I felt like I was trying to play the part of a therapist and it would be painfully obvious to any third party that I was woefully unprepared to do so.
“Then it was a bad day,” she said. “I felt like I failed.”
I suddenly recalled something she had mentioned often back when we lived together. She never went into great detail, and had a way of minimizing the despair this subject caused her. But it was clear to me, and probably our other hallmates as well, that her illness was not a result of merely deciding to eat less one day. It was obvious since that night she watched a music video entitled “Till it Happens to You”, drank copious amounts of vodka, and promptly had an emotional meltdown that something more significant triggered her eating disorder.
“What about your boyfriend?” I asked. “Would you say he was the cause of all this?”
“He was definitely a factor,” C replied hesitantly. “ He was older than me and the relationship was kind of, like, secret, you know? My parents didn’t approve. He would always tell me ‘fat girls are so ugly.’ And I wanted to be pretty for him, you know?”
We were both silent for a while, trying to process how something as simple as the desire to impress a boy could derail one’s adolescence so disastrously.
“One time I called myself fat and he said ‘No, babe, you’re so pretty - I could eat cereal out of your collar bones.’” C seemed embarrassed by how much pride she had once taken out of this disturbing remark.
“He wasn’t the source,” she chose her words carefully. “But he was definitely . . . the spark.” She fell quiet and I decided this avenue of conversation had extinguished itself.
“So when did people notice?”
“We were moving,” she explained, “and my parents noticed the self-harm scars I had running up my legs. They put me in therapy for a while. Eventually, I told the therapist I was, you know, done. Just done. I told her I was going to swallow a bottle of pills that night. I thanked her for trying to help but I was just over it. I was resigned about the whole thing, didn’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other. ”
C was immediately taken to the emergency room following this therapy session. At this point in her life, she described herself as having skeletal shoulders and no stomach. She had taken to loose, baggy clothes and was especially partial to sweatshirts, even in the summertime. She only weighed eighty seven pounds.
“And the therapist didn't notice?” I asked dubiously.
“She had her suspicions, I’m sure,” C said. “But she admitted to me later that she felt unqualified to handle the severity of my condition.”
I balked at the idea that no one would see their own daughter, sister, friend, disappear steadily in front of their eyes.
“There was one person,” C remembered suddenly. When she was fifteen years old, a classmate she never spoke to slipped a book onto her desk, a book about eating disorders. Inside the book was a note, encouraging her to seek help.
“I was offended at the time. I didn’t think anything was wrong with me.”
“You were in denial.”
C reached into her bag and fished around inside for her wallet. She slipped out a piece of paper but did not offer it to me. My gaze only captured the name “Lauren” scrawled at the bottom in feminine script.
“I keep the note with me everywhere I go now,” she said soberly.
C was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and major depression, as well as obsessive compulsive tendencies in regards to her weight. She was in the hospital for a miserable two months, which she described as being like “solitary confinement.”
She believes attending “Program” saved her life.
“It finally started to make sense to me that I was sick,” C said, sounding more upbeat. “The eating disorder, it distorts a person’s thinking. I was finally educated on my condition and realized it wasn’t my fault.” Learning the science behind “ it”changed her perspective.
She happily relayed to me the structure of Program, and how she felt it helped her the most during her recovery. It was an outpatient program and she was given a meal plan as well as access to therapy for her and the people in her life. “Family night was on Tuesday,” she noted. I didn’t have to ask her to elaborate.
“My mother could be . . . unforgiving of imperfection,” she looked at me searchingly, trying to make sure she had used the right words.
“Did you feel ashamed of your condition?”
“Oh yeah, big time,” she said. “I felt like I was a burden for my family.”
C recalled how she began forcing herself to eat in an effort to gain weight as soon as possible; the hospital and subsequent program, she decided, were costing her family too much money and now that she knew what was wrong with her, why not just, you know, stop?
She threw up many times as her body was not yet adjusted, not yet ready to let go of its trauma. There were two separate occasions where her nasogastric tube was displaced as a result, an experience she implied was excruciating. An especially compassionate nurse was the one to hold and comfort her during the ensuing mental breakdowns.
“The disease pulled my family together,” C claimed. Her relationship with her mother improved significantly. Guilt was something they all had to confront.
“It was hard, but it was worth it,” C said with a smile.
According to C, stigma against mental illness was a huge factor in the initial conflict with her parents. Their words likely echo in the minds of every mentally unhealthy child of color who has made the mistake of displaying such a vulnerability:
“Why are you doing this to yourself?”
C insists now that both she and her parents understand that it was the eating disorder that did this to her.
Program was run by a man named Dr. Marr, a leading researcher in eating disorders and mental health among youth, and it took place in Rancho Cucamonga. I noted how strange it was to realize that while I was learning precalculus and writing essays on Shakespeare, a girl I would one day live with was recovering practically next door, missing out on such a formative part of her life.
C and I both reached the conclusion that while the hospital helped her physically get her weight back up, all the emotional work was done in Program.
“I grew up a lot,” she said and then added, uncertainly, “I feel indebted to it, you know? It let me see parts of myself I didn’t before. I’m stronger now and I can endure so much more. Like if I could make it through this, I could make it through an algebra test.”
“And what about your identity? Did your mental illness impact your conception of yourself?”
She thought about this for a great deal of time. “Who I was and who I was meant to be...are intact. I’m sensitive, blunt, empathetic, loud, funny, I’m so many things. The eating disorder tried but it could not warp the core of who I am.”
Recovery, C believes, is all about accepting yourself.
“This is something that’s always going to be at the back of my mind,” she explained. “It’s chronic; but I’m getting better. It’s going to get better. I know it is.”
The conversation drifted. We discussed school life, working, friends, etc. She told me about her boyfriend, Ian, and how happy he makes her. I reminded her how the two of them fell asleep while video-chatting with one another one day during freshman year. She told me about an infuriating roommate she had had to deal with the previous winter. I told her about a fight I’d had with my former best friend. She told me about her cat and I told her about my dog. She told me about the time a customer pulled a gun out at her job. I told her why I quit mine. A meetup I expected to take no more than thirty minutes managed to eat up five hours.
Finally, I thanked her for her help and willingness to share with me for my assignment.
“No problem,” she shrugged. “I’m spreading awareness, you know? I’m kind of like, the best case scenario.” She laughed and I agreed. We said our goodbyes.
I was halfway home when it finally occurred to me why I couldn’t recognize her earlier. It wasn’t a haircut, or a new wardrobe, or the lack of makeup that changed C’s appearance in the last two years.
It was the fact that she had, to my utter delight, put on quite a bit of weight since we last met.
#science writing#science#mental health#mental health stigma#anorexia#Anorexia nervosa#eating disoder recovery#eating disorder#Interview#journalism#science journalism#depression#Psychology#neuroscience
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Astronomers capture first image of a black hole
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) – a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration – was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. This breakthrough was announced in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun.
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'Robotic Skins' turn everyday objects into robots
When you think of robotics, you likely think of something rigid, heavy, and built for a specific purpose. New “Robotic Skins” technology developed by Yale researchers flips that notion on its head, allowing users to animate the inanimate and turn everyday objects into robots.
Developed in the lab of Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, robotic skins enable users to design their own robotic systems. Although the skins are designed with no specific task in mind, Kramer-Bottiglio said, they could be used for everything from search-and-rescue robots to wearable technologies. The results of the team’s work are published today in Science Robotics.
Keep reading
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A man from London has become the second person in the world to be cured of HIV, doctors say.
Adam Castillejo is still free of the virus more than 30 months after stopping anti-retroviral therapy.
He was not cured by the HIV drugs, however, but by a stem-cell treatment he received for a cancer he also had.
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The reverse progression of Modern Humans to simple life forms.
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//Wet Specimens from the Natural History Museum- lizards and various marine animals preserved in formaldehyde//
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Ridiculous title aside, this Japanese dinosaur mini-series is easily the most ambitious, up-to-date, and beautifully-animated documentaries I’ve ever seen. A perfect balance of both fact and well-educated speculation allows for a wide variety of unique and interesting behaviors to be portrayed. This also includes fight scenes that put even Jurassic Park to shame.
Amazing Dinoworld-Curiosity Stream
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Is the Pen Mightier than the Keyboard?
As we move farther and farther into the Age of Information and adjust to life in an increasingly paperless world, the importance of technology in our everyday lives has become a matter of great concern to everyone from sociologists to neuroscientists to government officials. One topic of great controversy that has been steadily gaining new insights consistently in the last decade is whether or not technology has a place in our classrooms. Although some regard devices such as cell phones and laptops as tools that can allow students to learn more efficiently, others believe such technological adjustments to traditional forms of education would be detrimental instead.
Two researchers from Princeton University set out to test whether or not the simple act of taking notes in class by laptop or by pen made a difference in how a student performed academically. Although this study gives no clear-cut answers as to what notetaking strategy is more beneficial for all students in regards to all kinds of subject material, the evidence it presents suggests that students who take notes the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper, processed newer material better than those who absentmindedly typed everything they heard in the lecture on a laptop.
Three studies were conducted to observe how well students performed according to their notetaking habits. Their performance was measured by analyzing how well they could recall basic facts and details and how well they could apply and understand concepts. The first study involved over sixty students from Princeton who watched a series of TED talks videos and were tested approximately half an hour later on the content of the material. The data showed that when it came to factually recalling material, the students performed equally when tested regardless of whether they took their notes longhand or by typing. However, in measuring conceptual-application, those who took their notes by hand did significantly better than their counterparts.
In the second study, 151 students from UCLA were tested similarly, except those who typed their notes were split into two groups: intervention and nonintervention. In the intervention group, students who typed their notes were warned not to mindlessly transcribe information word by word as those working on keyboards are prone to do. Those in the nonintervention-laptop group were not told ahead of time to be more mindful of the notes they took. The data shows that the intervention group still transcribed the subject content of the videos roughly to the same degree as the nonintervention group. The results of this study were quite similar to those of the first.
Those who took notes by pen still performed better than those in the nonintervention-laptop group. However, the performance of the students in the intervention group were reported to not differ very much from either the longhand participants or the nonintervention participants. The ambiguous nature of this particular finding makes it difficult to say for sure whether warning students on laptops to pay more attention to what they typed made a difference in their academic performance.
In the third study, 118 of the participants from the second study returned to once again take notes by either laptop or hand on some lectures and were tested on the material one week later. The quality of their notes was analyzed by allowing some participants, from both the longhand and laptop groups, to review their notes right before being tested and measuring any differences in their performances. Those who took their notes the traditional way and were able to review them right before the assessment outperformed the students in the other groups. However, among the students who were not able to study, there was not a big difference in the performance of those who typed out their notes and those who hand-wrote them.
The researchers were able to find some patterns among all three studies that accounted for the differences between the students who took longhand notes and those who used their laptops for notes. Although the scientists found that a higher word count correlated to higher performance, the percentage of verbatim overlap -- when students would write down they heard verbatim without processing any of it -- also increased with word count; however, more verbatim overlap typically resulted in lower performance.
Longhand notetakers wrote noticeably less than their typing counterparts, however, they also had far fewer instances of verbatim overlap. Even when warned of this phenomenon, verbatim overlap did not decrease significantly among the laptop notetakers. Longhand notes appeared to be more beneficial to students as they performed the best when given a chance to review these notes before being tested on the material.
The researchers believe the mental processes of encoding and external-storage can explain how a student may learn from taking notes. Encoding refers to the active processing that happens while a student takes notes while external-storage is the effect of reviewing their notes. The former is more beneficial to conceptual understanding of material whereas the latter seems to be better for memorization and factual recall. The researchers suggested that taking notes on a laptop improved the benefits of external-storage, however, this could damage whatever benefits the encoding process offers. It seems that longhand note-taking is helpful for encoding, and reviewing these notes improves the benefits of external-storage.
This study as a whole seems to support the idea that taking notes longhand might improve the processes of mental functioning needed to understand material and may result in higher quality notes that are more beneficial for a student to review than notes absentmindedly transcribed when typing on a laptop. However, the data does not make a hard case for whether the physical act of writing down notes improves academic performance when compared to typing on a laptop screen. Instead, it is suggested that both mediums simply encourage different note taking strategies, and that taking notes longhand is likely more beneficial, but these benefits are only really expounded over the long term when the notes are reviewed in a timely manner.
#Science news#Science research#Science writing#Science journalism#Psychology study#neuroscience research#Neuroscience study#Student life#Studying
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Day 39
Today was a decent day, I did chemistry and some biology. Also, that's Albert Einstein with Marie Curie, & I took the other picture outside my orthodontist's place
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“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Happy 163rd birthday to the father of quantum mechanics, theoretical physicist Max Planck, born on this day, 23rd April 1858 in Kiel—Duchy of Holstein, Germany.
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NASA did experiment on spiders using random drug/substance to see how it gonna affect their web making | source
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