clipped from www.boston.com

The debate over the Dog Whisperer

His TV show is a hit and celebrities swear by him. But his tough-love training has detractors barking that positive reinforcement is less cruel and fetches better results.

clipped from www.boston.com

Now widely used around the world by animal trainers in zoos, performing-animal handlers, and domestic pet trainers, the clicker method and other positive, noncoercive forms of training have scientific evidence backing up their effectiveness, according to Dr. Nicholas Dodman, director of the Animal Behavior Clinic at Tufts University.

Now pediatricians and schools and parents have swung to a reinforcement-based model. In the dog world, I think that operant techniques are gradually sweeping the system.

clipped from news.medill.northwestern.edu

Maybe the Three Blind Mice didn’t really need their vision

Hartmann said one of the biggest surprises in her research was finding out how much independent control a rat has over its whiskers. Hartmann’s team found that whiskers do not bend and move the way people typically think– in sync and in a fluid brushing motion. A rat can shut down one side of its whiskers, while the other side goes to work.

Hartmann explained why it is important for scientists to study such seeminglyunusual systems as rat whiskers.
“By studying rat whiskers, what we’re really studying is the neural basis for the sense of touch and motor control. In the long run, understanding the rat’s neural circuits will greatly help us in understanding circuits of the human brain, and helping people with motor and sensing disabilities or injuries.”

clipped from www.thesun.co.uk

Unlucky Dunham had spent months being nursed back to health by carers after he
was found washed up on coastline in Florida.

Biologists at the Clearwater Aquarium, Florida, spent seven months treating
the stricken dolphin — before releasing him into the sea.

They watched on in horror as the predator mounted a stealth attack on the
mammal — tearing into the dolphin with its razor-sharp teeth.

clipped from www.nih.gov

New Insights Into Novel H1N1

Several research groups funded by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) have recently put together a picture of where the novel H1N1 virus came from and how it evolved. They discovered that the novel H1N1 virus is a descendent not only of swine viruses but also of the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 pandemic, which killed 40-50 million people worldwide.

clipped from www.sciencedaily.com

On Malaria Struggle, Baboons And Humans Have Similar Stories To Tell

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2009) — Evolutionarily speaking, baboons may be our more distant cousins among primates. But when it comes to our experiences with malaria over the course of time, it seems the stories of our two species have followed very similar plots.

“It’s a nice example of how – in the vastness of the genome – the same gene was modified in the same way in two different species to produce the same kind of resistance,” says Greg Wray, director of the IGSP’s Center for Evolutionary Genomics. “That’s a pretty remarkable thing when you think of all the different ways malaria resistance might have evolved.”

clipped from www.newsroom.ucla.edu

Close social ties make baboons better mothers, study finds

“If you’re a baboon, the strength of your mother’s relationship with other females is the best predictor of whether you’ll live to have children yourself,” said Joan Silk, the study’s lead author and a UCLA professor of anthropology. “The study adds to mounting evidence of the biological benefits of close relationships among females.”

The findings are significant because “survivorship to reproduction is the gold standard in evolutionary biology,” said co-author Dorothy Cheney, a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Females who raise offspring to a reproductive age are more likely see their genes pass along, so these findings demonstrate an evolutionary advantage to strong relationships with other females. In evolutionary terms, social moms are the fittest moms — at least when it comes to baboons.”