Ronnie is now 11 weeks old and we have had quite an adventure! Here’s a look at us being trained at a local ‘puppy class!’ How am I doing??
Here is what I am reading today:
“In research on animal social dynamics, large mammals such as wolves and gorillas have received a lot of attention, because their groups’ smaller numbers make them easier to study, says Andrew King, a behavioral ecologist at Swansea University in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the study. But when hundreds or thousands of creatures synchronize their movements, the decision-making process is harder to sort out. King says that these big groups have traditionally been viewed as hoards of anonymous agents in a democracy. “Five or so years ago, papers were saying that you should be finding consensus decisions where everybody has an equal say.””
“The theory is that men and women are completely different in the way that they experience arousal and express desire. But the first large-scale study trying to tease apart what goes on in the minds and bodies of men and women when it comes to sex shows that there are more differences within each gender than there are across gender lines.
“In the August 2013 Scientific AmericanUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison researchers Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli propose quite a different theory of what happens in the sleeping brain. They suggest that brain activity during slumber must weaken neural connections, not strengthen them, because strengthening would saturate the brain’s circuitry and consume so much energy that the brain could not continue to encode new information.”
“Each mammal has a pair of sex chromosomes. Females have two copies of the X chromosome, and males have one, along with a Y chromosome. The body needs only one active copy of the X chromosome, so in females, the second copy is disabled. Almost 50 years ago, a geneticist named Susumu Ohno proposed that this shutdown slowed the evolution of the X chromosome, and he predicted that its genes would be very similar across most mammals. David Page, a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wanted to check if that was true between mice and humans, which are separated by 80 million years of evolution.”
“Train passengers and railway staff push a train car in their effort to rescue a woman who fell and got stuck between the car and the platform while getting off at Japan Railway Minami Urawa Station in Saitama, near Tokyo, Monday morning, July 22, 2013. A Yomiuri Shimbun photographer who happened to be there said there was a big applause when the woman in her mid-30s, who fell to her waist, was safely rescued without any serious injuries. About 40 people helped the staff who were pushing the car upon hearing an announcement that a passenger has been trapped.”
“Psychological scientist Kathleen Vohs of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota wondered about the power of rituals after noticing the funny routines that people — including Vohs herself — often perform before eating and drinking:
“Whenever I order an espresso, I take a sugar packet and shake it, open the packet and pour a teeny bit of sugar in, and then taste,” Vohs observes. “It’s never enough sugar, so I then pour about half of the packet in. The thing is, this isn’t a functional ritual, I should just skip right to pouring in half the packet.””
“A research, recently published on the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that a correlate of a body-ownership illusion is that the virtual type of body carries with it a set of temporary changes in perception and behaviours that are appropriate to that type of body. The research has been carried out by Domma Banakou, Raphaela Groten and Mel Slater, experts from the Experimental Virtual Environments Lab for Neuroscience and Technology (Event Lab) at the Faculty of Psychology of the UB.”
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