What Does Fido Want?

Statistically speaking, most readers of this blog will have owned, own, or will own a pet at some point in their life. I myself love pets, but stick to the non-furry kinds of pets (fish and reptiles, mainly) due to asthma and allergies.

Dr. Jaak Panksepp is a neuroscientist and psychobiologist, and the Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Dept of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. As if that wasn't impressive sounding enough, he's contributed a lot to the modern knowledge we have of base emotions, which all animals feel, and our understanding of the pathways emotions have through the brain (of all mammals, not just humans).

His research is astounding. His studies have found that there are seven genetic emotional systems. They are:

• SEEKING (sensation of being curious/trying to make sense of surroundings)
• RAGE (self-explanatory) 
• FEAR (fear for social/physical/mental survival)
• LUST (also self-explanatory)
• CARE (typically maternal)
• PANIC (also grief, having to do with separation distress)
• PLAY (joyful)

His research helped us determine how best to interact with animals, and it's turning some of our original ideas on it's head. For instance animals can laugh. While it doesn't sound like our laughter, when you tickle rats, they chirp and are more likely to act favorably towards you. When chimps play with each other they pant. Science has traditionally thought that animals don't get happy or sad, but this is view is slowly changing. 

Some of his research has been shanghaied by others, to attempt to understand the basic emotional needs of animals, in order to make pet ownership easier, and living in captivity easier for the animals. If you want to hear Dr. Jaak Panksepp's research in words a non-scientist can understand, I encourage you to check out any book by Dr. Temple Grandin, an animal advocate whose autism allowed her deeper insight into the minds of animals. She is a truly remarkable woman, and she explains the science of it so much better than I ever could.

Dr. Grandin answers the question asked in the title of this blog in her book Animals Make Us Human, where she argues that in order to make our animal feel emotionally secure, as well as physically secure, we must try to keep our animals from feeling the RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC emotions that Dr. Panksepp  describes, and make sure the animals feels all of the positive emotions: SEEKING, LUST, CARE, and PLAY.

For a more in depth look at animal emotion, you might try to watch the documentary Animal Emotion: Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry. It's fairly old, and I cannot find a link to a version that I wouldn't get in trouble for posting, but I'm certain you intelligent readers can find it on the Internet somewhere!

Sources:

It's No Joke

Why Does Depression

Animals Make Us Human

Animals In Translation

Apocalypse Then

We live in the Milky Way Galaxy. Our neighbor is the Andromeda Galaxy. The Milky Way will be consumed by the Andromeda Galaxy in about five billion years (according to the latest studies).

Not to worry, however, because life on Earth will end much sooner than that, when our sun enters the red-giant stage of it's life, it's diameter will reach Earth (having engulfed Mercury and Venus). In all honesty life would probably end before this phase. The sun will become a red giant star in approximately five billion years (about when our galaxy starts getting consumed by Andromeda). However Earth will have gotten too hot for life to continue a bit earlier than five billion years from now.

More heat means more water vapor and less carbon dioxide, so the plants will go first. As plant species go extinct, the animals will decline too pretty much simultaneously. In approximately 2.8 billion years scientists estimate that only the hardiest of microbes will be left behind. Once temperatures reach over 140 degrees Celsius, DNA breaks down, and even those microbes will be lost.

Image courtesy SDO/NASA

Don't fret, however. This is an unimaginably long time away.

Or, perhaps, fret a lot, because current rates of climate change weren't given a lot of consideration, and that's looking bleaker by the second.

Sources.
Milky Way Will Be Consumed

Biosignature Doomsday

The Future Is HERE

So this happened last year, and some of you may have heard of it already, but recently someone was complaining that the Back To The Future Hoverboards haven't been created by scientists yet and would scientists just invent that already?

Well my impatient friend, scientists have something better to do. Like create the first 3D printed titanium human jaw and successfully implant it into a female patient.

BOOM.

So what happened was this woman had osteomyelitis (bone infection) that was so bad her lower jaw couldn't be saved. The awesome folks at Hasselt University Biomed (in Belgium) has a functional morphology research group and decided to help out. Functional morphology is the study of why things are shaped the way they  are shaped, and how that shape affects the function of the thing.

So this research group created a customized 3D printed titanium jaw. They gave her an MRI so that they could customize the jaw, and built it in just two days.

This woman had a complete lower jaw implant, and it restored vital functions (breathing, speech, chewing, and sensation) as well as aesthetics (her jawline still looks like her). It's an incredible step forward with implants and health care. While current technologies limit the amount of personalized prosthetics that can be made, this could be commonplace in the near future, and represents a huge step forward in medical technology. This technique could be used in hip prosthetics, as well as knees and elbows, even spinal inserts.

It's all very exciting.

Sources:
3D Printer World

UHasseltBE

The Body Farm

Human decomposition is probably not something you want to think about often. I find it fascinating. It's one of those things that's taboo to talk about in society. Which is why I'm going to talk about it in honor of one of my favorite authors, Mary Roach, who wrote the book Stiff, which I just finished and thoroughly enjoyed. It's been around a while, but I just got to it, and I'm encouraging all of you to go out and read it. You can check it out here.

UT Knoxville has a body farm. A body farm is a research facility where human decomposition is studied.  UT Knoxville cleverly names their body farm the Forensic Anthropology Center (FAC), so that it's less creepy sounding. While creepy, what they do there is fascinating stuff, and provides a lot of interesting and relevant facts that allow us to better solve crimes.

At the FAC law enforcement can request the recreation of a crime scene (like stuffing dead bodies into trunks and things) and the FAC will then test out those cases. They'll take a dead body, toss it into a field, or bury it, or stuff it in a trunk, and then they'll force some poor student/intern to monitor the stench/bugs/decay and such. The FAC even works with the FBI testing out facial recognition programs.

Personally I think that while this is probably a very foreign concept to most people, this is such a contribution to our pool of knowledge. There are certain things that, in the modern world, are slightly taboo to discuss (for instance things that happen to your body after you die). So it's nice to know that the squeamishness of some people hasn't limited the quest for knowledge.

To hear more about it in a more entertaining medium, here is a link to a video NatGeo did on Body Farms.

Also FYI If you want to contribute, you can donate your corpse. Once they're done with your dead body, they'll cremate your remains and hand you back to your family, OR they'll add your skeleton to their collection (they have 1,100).

There is actually going to be another body farm established in, I think, Michigan that is going to be dedicated to how bodies decay in cold weather, which is probably going to be fascinating, and I'm looking forward to the papers they'll be publishing as they get going.

Sources:
UT Knoxville

Awesome College Labs

The Body Farm

How Bats Fly

My brain goes on tangents, sometimes, and instead of working this morning, I spent the better part of three hours studying bat muscles, so you guys are going to get the summation of what I learned here, with some comparisons and contrasts to avian flight, because it's interesting, to say the least.

If you don't know if you think bats are cool, let me just drop these facts on you:

• A colony of 500 bats could eat over a quarter of a million mosquitoes per hour (of course this number is smaller in reality because bats also eat beetles, wasps, moths, and other pesky insects)
• Bats have a talent for pollinating plants and dispersing seeds (bat poop is excellent fertilizer with fungicidal and nematocidal properties), promoting biodiversity and getting that backyard of yours looking flowery and beautiful
• Less than 0.5% of all bats test positive for rabies, so they aren't as dangerous as you think they are

Bats vs. Birds

• Birds have less joints in their wings than bats, which makes their wings more rigid (bats actually have a couple more joints than the joints present in human hands, allowing them precision control over the shape of the wing)
• Bird wings are more efficient at providing lift, but bat wings are more maneuverable (bats can move and hover in all directions, while birds are more limited)
• Bats can move the wing like a hand, making the motion of the wing more like swimming/rowing in the air, as opposed to the avian flapping motion

Anatomy of a Bat Wing

• Bats have a thin membrane of skin (pantagium) between hand and body, and between each finger bone
• The thumb extends out of the wing as a small claw which is used for climbing
• Bats have 12-20% of their entire body weight in each one of their wings, so they maneuver using inertia (they need to be able to react against their own weight)
• Each wing has long muscles embedded in the skin, front to back, which aren't attached to any bones and help shape the wings in flight. They are called plagiopatagiales proprii.

Bat Flight

Takeoff

• Bats usually prefer to fall into flight from a high location (having used their thumbs to climb to said location)
• They can takeoff from the ground when forced due to extra elastic biceps and triceps tendons

Downstroke

• Muscles contract (Pectoralis major, Subscapularis, Serraturs anterior (partial), and Deltoid (partial))
• Plagiopatagiales muscles tense to make the skin stretch less
• Membrane (pantagium) curves allowing for greater lift using less energy than a bird would expend

Upstroke

• Muscles contract (Deltoid (partial), Trapezius, Infraspinatus, Supraspinatus)
• Plagiopatagiales muscles relax
• The wing folds and slides along the body

So respect your local bat population. Because bats are awesome.

Sources:

How Bats Take Flight

Organization for Bat Conservation Video

Bats vs. Mosquitos

Bat Basics

Bats are more efficient fliers than Birds

Brown University Discovers Tiny Muscles in Bat Wings

Ode to Snakes

WARNING: This post contains pictures of snakes

Way back when I started this blog (before I fell off the wagon and stopped posting) I mentioned that I was going to Costa Rica to do some research. It was research in the field of Ecology, and I was there for two summers while I was at university, the first working on someone else's project, and the second working on my own.

I love snakes. I love finding them, identifying them, learning about their physiology, and listing the ones I've seen in the wild. I consider them to be beautiful rather than creepy, fascinating rather than frightening. And both summers in Costa Rica were dedicated to finding them.

So here are some photos. Please note that I don't encourage people to handle snakes unless they've received professional training, some of these snakes are venomous (2 to be exact) and those ones were not handled at all. I would not under any circumstances describe myself to be an expert with snakes, and I don't encourage others to assume that about themselves either.

Corallus annulatus

Sibon nebulatus

Bothreichis schlegelii (venomous)

Sibon longifrenis

Imantodes inornatus

Tantilla supracincta (coral snake mimic)

Oxyrhopus petolarius (coral snake mimic)

Porthidium nasutum (venomous)

Note: use the photos as you like, but please give credit 

Out Of Africa

Recently I went to see the new exhibit at California Academy of Science(CAS), called Skulls. This exhibit is, obviously, about skulls, more specifically, the skulls of vertebrate animals.

It was a wonderful exhibit, and I enjoyed myself very much. I encourage you all to go if you live nearby. My opinion was that the only thing they could so better would be to include more about comparative anatomy, but I'll post about that later.

After I saw this exhibit I went to the African exhibit, which was very interesting, and included a bit about human origins. Now I'm not criticizing this exhibit for the content it included, that was presented beautifully, I'm miffed about what the exhibit didn't include, which was some of the other models about human evolution.

CAS included only the Out of Africa model, which admittedly has the most support right now, but is in no way proven to the point that it is a theory and not a hypothesis.

So I'm going to go over the major hypotheses of human origins, so that you readers may know the options.

The Multiregional Continuity Model
Says: "After Homo erectus left Africa and dispersed into other portions of the Old World, regional populations slowly evolved into modern humans"
Means: Modern humans evolved from their ancestors (that lived all over Africa, Europe, and Asia) all together (albeit slowly) in every location
Looks Like This:

(thanks to Fred the Oyster for the graph)

The Out Of Africa Model
Says: "Modern humans evolved in Africa, migrated out of Africa, and replaced all populations which had descended from Homo erectus"
Means: Modern humans evolved in one location, and the earlier species were outmatched by how super duper awesome modern humans were... I kid... sort of
Looks Like This:

Apologies for poor image quality, and thanks to discover magazine

Now to be sure, Out Of Africa has the most support, but more recent discoveries have challenged it a bit. The timing of human dispersal is controversial, and likely will remain controversial until we discover more fossils, so I'm not going to weigh in on either theory as being more likely than the other. I simply think that both should be considered, and there is nothing wrong with presenting two opinions to the public, or admitting that science has yet to uncover all of the facts.

Sources:
actionbioscience

The Petralona Man

We were all Africans

Genetic Support for the out-of-Africa theory