Free Republic

What an eggsperiment! A group of high school students in Japan have made an incredible discovery - they've figured out how to hatch a perfectly healthy chick from an egg without the shell. The discovery is so significant, the students' findings have been published in a scientific journal. The experiment - which was filmed and then shared on YouTube - consists of a few very simple steps and takes less than one month. By day three - the little chick's heart had formed, and by day five, the outline of its body could be seen. In just three weeks, a...

They may be man's best friend, but dogs have little to thank humans for it seems. Research suggests the domesticated pets can't solve problems as well as their wild cousins because living with us has made them 'incapable of thinking for themselves.' In tests, experts presented a 'puzzle box' containing food to a group of dogs, and a group of wolves and while the wolves were capable of breaking inside, the dogs looked to humans for help.

Dogs can copy each other's expressions in a split-second just like people, showing signs of basic empathy, according to Italian researchers. Mimicking each other's facial expressions is a human habit, which helps people to get along. Dogs do the same to bond with other dogs, scientists report in the journal, Royal Society Open Science. They think dogs may be showing a basic built-in form of empathy, enabling them to pick up on emotions. And the phenomenon may have emerged in our canine companions during the process of domestication, say scientists from the Natural History Museum, University of Pisa.

This week, millions of people around the world will no doubt experience rapid mimicry-an involuntary, split-second mirroring of another person's facial expressions-as they exchange smiles over gifts, good meals and holiday traditions. This phenomenon, observed in humans and many other primates, is considered a basic building block of our ability to feel empathy. "When your companion or friend smiles, you don't know why exactly, but you immediately react with the same smile to him or her," says Elisabetta Palagi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pisa in Italy. "It’s an extremely important phenomenon, because through this mimicry you can...

Dogs really are man's best friend, it seems, as researchers have shown they can recognise emotions in humans by combining information from different senses. They are the only creatures outside of humans who have been observed to have that ability. -SNIP- "Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs. "To do so requires a system of internal categorisation of emotional states. This cognitive ability has until now only been evidenced in primates and the capacity to do this across species only...

A golden jackal (Canis anthus) from Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. Based on genomic results, the researchers suggest this animal be referred to as the African golden wolf, which is distinct from the Eurasian golden jackal (Canis aureus). Credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson ======================================================================================================================= Despite their remarkably similar appearance, the "golden jackals" of East Africa and Eurasia are actually two entirely different species. The discovery, based on DNA evidence and reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on July 30, increases the overall biodiversity of the Canidae—the group including dogs, wolves, foxes, and jackals—from 35 living species to 36. "This...

The genetic heritage of New Zealand's first dog, the now extinct kuri, is being unravelled by University of Otago scientists using state-of-the-art ancient DNA analysis. University of Otago PhD student Karen Greig has sequenced the complete, or near complete, mitochondrial genomes of 14 kuri represented by bones recovered from Wairau Bar, one on New Zealand's earliest and most important archaeological sites. Kuri were smallish dogs about the size of cocker spaniels and were brought to New Zealand from East Polynesia in the colonising canoes that arrived in the early fourteenth century AD. They were the only domesticated animal to be...

By Paul Rincon 20 October 2015 Dogs may have become man's best friend in Central Asia, according to the study Today's dogs can trace their origins to Central Asia, according to one of the most comprehensive genetic surveys yet. Dogs are the most diverse animal on the planet - a legacy of thousands of years of selective breeding by humans. But they derive from wild wolves that were gradually tamed and inducted into human hunting groups - perhaps near Mongolia or Nepal. The findings come from an analysis of DNA from thousands of pooches, and are published in PNAS journal....

You may think your dog has an irrational hatred of cats, but their instinct to chase felines out of their territory might be more reasonable than you think. Fossils have revealed the two species have a rocky past after the introduction of cats to the Americas had a devastating effect on the continent's species of wild dogs. In fact, it is thought that competition from cats caused up to 40 species of dog to become extinct in the region millions of years ago.

Before humans milked cows, herded goats or raised hogs, before they invented agriculture, or written language, before they had permanent homes, and most certainly before they had cats, they had dogs. Or dogs had them, depending on how you view the human-canine arrangement. But scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient bond originated. And a large new study being run out of the University of Oxford here, with collaborators around the world, may soon provide some answers.

After living alongside humans for thousands of years, it would be nice to think that a bit of our mental agility has rubbed off on dogs. However, it seems that domestic dogs are actually less intellectually capable than the wild relatives they were bred from. Animal psychologists have found that wolves are able to count far better than domestic dogs - and it's because dogs have become used to relying on us to help them.

Man's best friend came about after generations of wolves scavenged alongside humans more than 33,000 years ago in south east Asia, according to new research. Dogs became self-domesticated as they slowly evolved from wolves who joined humans in the hunt, according to the first study of dog genomes. And it shows that the first domesticated dogs came about 33,000 years ago and migrated to Europe, rather than descending from domesticated European wolves 10,000 years ago as had previously been thought.

Humans may have domesticated dogs two separate times, taming wolves both in Europe and Asia thousands of years ago, according to new research. A major international research project may have cleared some of the controversy surrounding the origins of man's best friend, which has until now remained a mystery with two primary hypotheses. The first holds that humans domesticated dogs for the first time in Europe more than 15,000 years ago.

They may be man's best friend, but the question of where domestic dogs originated has long remained a mystery. Some argue that humans first domesticated wolves in Europe, while others claim this happened in Central Asia. Now, a new paper suggests that both these claims may be right, and that dogs were domesticated not once, but twice.

"The Spaniards were much impressed with the productivity of manioc in Arawak agriculture in the Greater Antilles," historian Jonathan Sauer recounts in his history of crop plants. "[A Spanish historian] calculated that 20 persons working 6 hours a day for a month could plant enough yuca to provide cassava bread for a village of 300 persons for 2 years." By all accounts, the Taíno were prosperous -- "a well-nourished population of over a million people," according to Sauer. And yet... lacked the monumental architecture of the Maya or the mathematical knowledge of the Aztec. And most importantly, they were not organized in...

The geology of the site, as well as pollen and algae finds, suggest that the hunter-gatherers encountered the mastodon next to a small pond that both humans and animals used as a water source, the researchers believe. Waters said that the prehistoric "people knew how to find game, fresh water and materials for making tools. These people were well adapted to this environment. The site is a slam-dunk pre-Clovis site with unequivocal artifacts, clear stratigraphy and thorough dating." Another research team previously excavated the site and found what they believed were dog remains, so dogs "would most likely have been...

Chinese archaeologists said they have found a paddy dating back more than 8,000 years, which could be the earliest wet rice farming site in the world. The field, covering less than 100 square meters, was discovered at the neolithic ruins of Hanjing in Sihong county in East China's Jiangsu province in November 2015, according to a spokesman with the archeology institute of Nanjing Museum. At a seminar held in late April to discuss findings at the Hanjing ruins, more than 70 scholars from universities, archeology institutes and museums across the country concluded that the wet rice field was the oldest...

An impressive array of brainpower —“Fat? Blame your genes, say doctors” —“Overweight? Maybe you really can blame your genes” —“Blame your genes for obesity” Headlines such as these have become a staple of science and health journalism. Are they right? Are obese people really helpless victims of their genes? Let us begin by distinguishing between “monogenic” obesity and what scientists call “common” obesity. Monogenic obesity, as the name implies, is caused by a mutation in a single gene, which is inherited in a Mendelian fashion, just as conditions such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis are. In the case of...

THE bond between man and dog is so close their hearts actually beat in sync when they are together an astounding new study shows. The heart rates of owners and their dogs become lower when they are in close proximity an experiment that saw heart monitors strapped to dogs and their owners found. The discovery shows dogs have a fundamental role to play in lowering stress says sports scientist Dr Craig Duncan. And canine scientist Mia Cobb says owning a dog can do more than just lower your heart rate. They even recover more quickly from a heart attack, she...

Dairy fats on Iron Age pottery sherds, evidence of pre-historic origin for dairying. The discovery of dairy fats on ancient pottery may indicate dairying high in the Alps occurred as early as the Iron Age over 3000 years ago, according to a study published April 21, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Francesco Carrer from the University of York, UK, and colleagues. Dairy farming has long been an important economic and cultural tradition in the European high Alps, but little is known about when and how the practice originated. Using organic residue analysis, the authors of the present...