What Are Dogs Saying When They Bark? [Excerpt]In this excerpt from a new book, two canine intelligence researchers explain how dogs use barks to communicate


Mystique is a dog who lives at Lola ya Bonobo, [the wildlife sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] where Vanessa and I study bonobos. During the day, she is sweet and demure, but at night she becomes a different animal. She guards our house, barking ferociously every time someone comes within earshot. Usually in Congo, a little extra security is appreciated. The only problem is that our house is on the main trail where the night staff walk back and forth after dark. Mystique dutifully barks at all passersby whether she has known them for a day or all her life. Eventually, we just learned to sleep through it. But if there was really a cause for concern, like a strange man with a gun, I wonder if Mystique would bark in a way that would alert me that there was something dangerous and different about the person approaching the house.

Dog vocalizations may not sound very sophisticated. Raymond Coppinger pointed out that most dog vocalizations consist of barking, and that barking seems to occur indiscriminately. Coppinger reported on a dog whose duty was to guard free- ranging livestock. The dog barked continuously for seven hours, even though no other dogs were within miles. If barking is communicative, dogs would not bark when no one could hear them. It seemed to Coppinger that the dog was simply relieving some inner state of arousal. The arousal model is that dogs do not have much control over their barking. They are not taking into account their audience, and their barks carry little information other than the emotional state of the barking dog.

Perhaps barking is another by-product of domestication. Unlike dogs, wolves rarely bark. Barks make up as little as 3 percent of wolf vocalizations. Meanwhile, the experimental foxes in Russia [that have been bred to be docile] bark when they see people, while the control foxes do not. Frequent barking when aroused is probably another consequence of selecting against aggression.

However, more recent research indicates that there might be more to barking than we first thought. Dogs have fairly plastic vocal cords, or a “modifiable vocal tract.” Dogs might be able to subtly alter their voices to produce a wide variety of different sounds that could have different meanings. Dogs might even be altering their voices in ways that are clear to other dogs but not to humans. When scientists have taken spectrograms, or pictures, of dog barks, it turns out that not all barks are the same—even from the same dog. Depending on the context, a dog’s barks can vary in timing, pitch, and amplitude. Perhaps they have different meanings.

I know two Australian dogs, Chocolate and Cina, who love to play fetch on the beach. Each throw sends them plunging through the waves, racing for that magic orb of rubber. When Chocolate retrieves the ball, inevitably Cina wrestles the ball from Chocolate’s mouth, even while Chocolate growls loudly. The girls also eat together, but when Cina tries the same trick with Chocolate’s food, the result is very different. A quiet growl from Chocolate warns Cina away.

It is difficult to see how Cina knows when it is okay to take something from Chocolate’s mouth, since both growls are made when Chocolate is aggravated and unwilling to share. If anything, Chocolate’s growl seems louder and scarier when she is playing than when she is eating.

Experiments have now shown that dogs use different barks and growls to communicate different things. In one experiment, researchers recorded a “food growl” where a dog was growling over food, and a “stranger growl” where a dog was growling at the approach of a stranger. The researchers played these different growls to a dog who was approaching a juicy bone. The dogs were more hesitant to approach if they heard the food growl rather than the stranger growl.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-are-dogs-saying-when-they-bark

June 12, 2013 — Pre-treatment scans of brain activity predicted whether depressed patients would best achieve remission with an antidepressant medication or psychotherapy, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

"Our goal is to develop reliable biomarkers that match an individual patient to the treatment option most likely to be successful, while also avoiding those that will be ineffective," explained Helen Mayberg, M.D., of Emory University, Atlanta, a grantee of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health.

Mayberg and colleagues report on their findings in JAMA Psychiatry, June 12, 2013.

"For the treatment of mental disorders, brain imaging remains primarily a research tool, yet these results demonstrate how it may be on the cusp of aiding in clinical decision-making," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D.

Currently, determining whether a particular patient with depression would best respond to psychotherapy or medication is based on trial and error. In the absence of any objective guidance that could predict improvement, clinicians typically try a treatment that they, or the patient, prefer for a month or two to see if it works. Consequently, only about 40 percent of patients achieve remission following initial treatment. This is costly in terms of human suffering as well as health care spending.

Mayberg's team hoped to identify a biomarker that could predict which type of treatment a patient would benefit from based on the state of his or her brain. Using a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, they imaged pre-treatment resting brain activity in 63 depressed patients. PET pinpoints what parts of the brain are active at any given moment by tracing the destinations of a radioactively-tagged form of glucose, the sugar that fuels its metabolism.

They compared brain circuit activity of patients who achieved remission following treatment with those who did not improve.

Activity in one specific brain area emerged as a pivotal predictor of outcomes from two standard forms of depression treatment: cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) or escitalopram, a serotonin specific reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant. If a patient's pre-treatment resting brain activity was low in the front part of an area called the insula, on the right side of the brain, it signaled a significantly higher likelihood of remission with CBT and a poor response to escitalopram. Conversely, hyperactivity in the insula predicted remission with escitalopram and a poor response to CBT.

Among several sites of brain activity related to outcome, activity in the anterior insula best predicted response and non-response to both treatments. The anterior insula is known to be important in regulating emotional states, self-awareness, decision-making and other thinking tasks. Changes in insula activity have been observed in studies of various depression treatments, including medication, mindfulness training, vagal nerve stimulation and deep brain stimulation.

"If these findings are confirmed in follow-up replication studies, scans of anterior insula activity could become clinically useful to guide more effective initial treatment decisions, offering a first step towards personalized medicine measures in the treatment of major depression" said Mayberg.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130612162358.htm

by Jane J. Lee on 31 January 2012, 4:56 PM | 1 Comment

Rappers could one day be part of a health-monitoring regimen—or at least their music could be. A prototype device that can track blood pressure in damaged blood vessels or monitor the bladders of incontinent patients draws its power from the low-frequency vibrations in rap music rather than from batteries.

Feel the beat. Researchers hold their test balloon up to speakers playing different types of music while monitoring the signal given off by the sensor inside.
Credit: Albert Kim and Seung Hyun Song
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In a paper presented 30 January at the 25th IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems in Paris, researchers described the guts of their 2-centimeter-long device. A small lever, which converts vibrations into electricity, powers a sensor that takes readings and transmits data. The lever, made of a thin layer of lead zirconate titanate (PZT) coating a glass core, responds to vibrations at 435 hertz.

This lever is connected to a capacitor, which stores the electricity until the vibrations stop. Once they stop, the released energy triggers a pressure sensor to take a reading and then transmit its data via a radio signal to a receiver. Patients with this implant could conceivably monitor their blood pressure by playing a couple of minutes of J. Cole's latest to charge the sensor, and then have it send the data to a receiver. And having a self-contained device to control conditions such as incontinence would be more convenient than having to insert a catheter or rush to the restroom all the time.

"Nothing happens when you stop playing music," says electrical engineer Babak Ziaie of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The implant works only when exposed to specific frequencies. And because of design constraints that dictate the length of the vibrating lever, those frequencies are most often found in rap music.

Not a fan of hip hop? No problem, Ziaie says. It wouldn't be hard to change the lever's length or thickness to respond to different musical preferences. "I like listening to classical music," he says, but his graduate student Albert Kim, who worked on the device, prefers rap. Changing the lever's dimensions changes the frequency it responds to, so Tchaikovsky buffs aren't stuck listening to Jay-Z.

The researchers tested their device in a water balloon to approximate human soft tissue. When they pressed the balloon to a metal plate attached to speakers (to ensure even sound distribution) playing rap music, their receiver picked up signals from the sensor 10 to 15 centimeters inside. That means that you can power a sensor deep in the body, Ziaie says.

The thumping bass in Rihanna's or Flo Rida's latest hits reaches these frequencies more often than other musical styles tested, including blues, jazz, and rock, according to Ziaie.

Current medical devices run on batteries that need to be changed periodically or rely on precise alignment of the sensor and the receiver to work properly, Ziaie says. The new device addresses those issues because music can power the sensor via the vibrating lever, and a receiver does not have to be perfectly positioned relative to the new sensor to achieve an accurate reading. As long as it can pick up a radio frequency, the receiver can get the data.

The music part sounds cool, writes Robert Langer, a biomedical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who was not involved with this research. But he cautions that some of the materials used in this device, such as PZT, merit careful packaging to ensure they don't leach out of their container.

"If you have lead in a biological system, it's a big concern," says Zhong Lin Wang, a nanotechnology and materials science engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who also was not involved with this research. Wang thinks another material, such as zinc oxide, would be much better to use as a lever. Zinc oxide is biocompatible and much cheaper to fabricate than PZT, he says.

Ziaie writes that they used PZT in their prototype because it was commercially available and it works well. And he agrees that the lead can be an issue for long-term implants. "One [would need] to hermetically seal the device in these cases," he says, "which is easily doable by sealing the glass capsule with a laser."

After some modifications to make the device smaller and safe for use in the body, Ziaie says his team plans on testing it by monitoring bladders in pigs.

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on 8 April 2010, 4:16 PM 

In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest of the world to accept that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe began with a big bang.

They're not surprising findings, but the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), says it chose to leave the section out of the 2010 edition of the biennial Science and Engineering Indicators because the survey questions used to measure knowledge of the two topics force respondents to choose between factual knowledge and religious beliefs.

"Discussing American science literacy without mentioning evolution is intellectual malpractice" that "downplays the controversy" over teaching evolution in schools, says Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit that has fought to keep creationism out of the science classroom. The story appears in this week's issue of Science.

Board members say the decision to drop the text was driven by a desire for scientific accuracy. The survey questions that NSF has used for 25 years to measure knowledge of evolution and the big bang were "flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs," says Louis Lanzerotti, an astrophysicist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who chairs NSB's Science and Engineering Indicators Committee.

The explanation doesn't appear to have soothed White House officials, who say that the edit—made after the White House had reviewed a draft—left them surprised and dismayed. "The Administration counts on the National Science Board to provide the fairest and most complete reporting of the facts they track," says Rick Weiss, a spokesperson and analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The deleted text, obtained by ScienceInsider, does not differ radically from what has appeared in previousIndicators. The section, which was part of the unedited chapter on public attitudes toward science and technology, notes that 45% of Americans in 2008 answered true to the statement, "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." The figure is similar to previous years and much lower than in Japan (78%), Europe (70%), China (69%), and South Korea (64%). The same gap exists for the response to a second statement, "The universe began with a big explosion," with which only 33% of Americans agreed.

The board member who took the lead in removing the text was John Bruer, a philosopher who heads the St. Louis, Missouri-based James S. McDonnell Foundation. He told Science that his reservations about the two survey questions dated back to 2007, when he was the lead reviewer for the same chapter in the 2008Indicators. He calls the survey questions "very blunt instruments not designed to capture public understanding" of the two topics.

"I think that is a nonsensical response" that reflects "the religious right's point of view," says Jon Miller, a science literacy researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing who authored the survey 3 decades ago and conducted it for NSF until 2001. "Evolution and the big bang are not a matter of opinion. If a person says that the earth really is at the center of the universe, even if scientists think it is not, how in the world would you call that person scientifically literate? Part of being literate is to both understand and accept scientific constructs."

When Science asked Bruer if individuals who did not accept evolution or the big bang to be true could be described as scientifically literate, he said: "There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution," adding that such questioning has led to improved understanding of evolutionary theory. When asked if he expected those academics to answer "false" to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: "On that particular point, no."

Lanzerotti told Science that even though the board had been aware of concerns about the two questions since before the 2008 survey was conducted, officials had not had a chance to alter the questions because the volume of work that goes into producing the Indicators is "vast," unlike "writing a 2000-word news article." However, both Lanzerotti and Lynda Carlson, director of NSF's statistical office that manages the survey and producesIndicators, say that it is time to take a fresh look at the survey. Last week, less than 48 hours after his interview with Science, Lanzerotti asked the head of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate to conduct a "thorough examination" of the questions through "workshops with experts."

Miller, the scientific literacy researcher, believes that removing the entire section was a clumsy attempt to hide a national embarrassment. "Nobody likes our infant death rate," he says by way of comparison, "but it doesn't go away if you quit talking about it."

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/04/evolution-big-bang-polls-omitted.html

by Sarah C. P. Williams on 5 June 2013, 5:00 PM | 10 Comments

Neandertals living 120,000 years ago in what is now Croatia were not exposed to industrial chemicals, and they ate a diet free from processed foods. Yet, that didn't spare them from our modern-day maladies. Scientists have discovered the first known case of a tumor in the rib of a Neandertal man that dates to more than 120,000 years ago. The oldest known human tumor is from less than 4000 years ago.

"Relatively little is known about [tumor] prevalence in antiquity," says forensic anthropologist Douglas Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the new work. This result "is very useful for understanding the roots of this disease."

The bone—part of an upper left rib from an adult male Neandertal—was originally unearthed between 1899 and 1905 during the excavation of Krapina, a cave in northern Croatia which has yielded hundreds of ancient human remains. But the rib was misfiled and ignored for almost a century until, in 1999, it was briefly described in a list of specimens. More recently, anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and colleagues began studying the pathologies of bones in the Krapina collections. It was immediately clear that the rib fragment—specimen 120.17 in the collection—wasn't normal. "The bone is broken away so you can look into the marrow chamber, where even in a child, you'd expect to see spongy bone," Frayer says. "But in this rib, instead of there being a mesh of bone there, it's completely vacant."

Even with the naked eye, the scientists recognized that empty area of bone indicated a tumor had once sat there. But to get more details on its size and shape, the researchers turned to x-rays and CT scans. These studies revealed that the void's physical characteristics--the type and location of missing bone—were consistent with a fibrous dysplastic neoplasm, a tumor caused by a bone growth disorder, the scientists report online today in PLOS ONE. Now, fibrous dysplastic neoplasms are one of the most common causes of tumors in the ribs and can cause bone fractures and pain.

"Unfortunately we don't have more of this particular skeleton," Frayer says. As a result, the researchers can't determine more details on the individual with the tumor, like whether his other bones had tumors and whether he had symptoms of systemic diseases that can occur alongside the tumors. Researchers also can't draw inferences from a single sample on the frequency of tumors in the Neandertal population, he says.

"There's always a temptation to try to read more into a lesion than one can confidently interpret," Ubelaker says. "But these authors did a splendid and careful job of taking the evidence only as far as it will go in terms of differential diagnosis."

The causes of fibrous dysplastic neoplasms aren't now understood. Knowing that they have been present in human relatives since prehistoric times could shed light on how the tumors co-opt an ancient molecular pathway in our cells to grow. But it will take more examples of ancient bone tumors to draw broader conclusions, the researchers say.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/06/neadertals-got-tumors-too.html?ref=hp

by Daniel Clery on 19 September 2011, 3:17 PM | 2 Comments

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Thirty prominent U.K. scientists today released a statement raising concern about the teaching of creationism in British publicly-funded schools. They highlight organizations that are visiting schools and sending them teaching materials that question the validity of evolution and promote "intelligent design" as an alternative theory. They argue that current government advice that creationism and intelligent design should not be taught in school science lessons needs to be made statutory and enforceable.

The list of signatories to the statement includes figures such as naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough, neuroscientist Colin Blakemore, transplant pioneer Roy Calne, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, chemist Harry Kroto, and geneticists Paul Nurse, Steve Jones, and John Sulston. It's also supported by various organizations, including the Association for Science Education, the British Science Association, and the British Humanist Association.

The warning comes at a time of change in U.K. education, as the first "free schools" begin teaching pupils. Free schools, introduced by the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat government, can be set up by nonprofit organizations, charities, or groups of parents. They receive funding from central government but are free from local government control, unlike normal state schools. They set their own curricula, so are not required to teach evolution, and are not prevented from teaching creationism. (The same applies to "academies," another type of independent state-funded school set up by the previous, Labour, government.)

According to today's statement, one organization, called Truth in Science, sent teaching materials to the heads of science and librarians of all secondary schools in the country that seek to undermine the theory of evolution. On its Web site, Truth in Science writes that "it is time for students to be permitted to adopt a more critical approach to Darwinism in science lessons. They should be exposed to the fact that there is a modern controversy over Darwin's theory of evolution and the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and that this has considerable social, spiritual, moral and ethical implications."

Another body, Creation Ministries International, has sent speakers presenting themselves as scientists to a number of schools. On its Web site, the group says "the scientific aspects of creation are important, but are secondary in importance to the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Sovereign, Creator, Redeemer and Judge."

In their statement, the scientists argue that government guidance "needs to be made comprehensive so that it is clear that any portrayal of creationism and 'intelligent design' as science (whether it takes place in science lessons or not) is unacceptable."

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/09/uk-scientists-challenge-creationism.html

The fastest land animal on Earth depends on more than speed to catch its prey. In order to successfully hunt, cheetahs need to be able to slam on the brakes and turn quickly, according to new research. One of the first efforts to capture the biomechanics of how animals hunt in the wild, the study pushes the limits of how researchers monitor animals.

"It's going to allow us for the first time to understand what any species is doing in its stride-by-stride activity," says David Carrier, a comparative biomechanist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who was not involved in the work. "This is a big step forward in terms of understanding what animals do in the real world."

Captive cheetahs have been clocked at more than 100 kilometers per hour, as fast as many cars on the highway. But how do they perform on African savannas? To find out, biomechanist Alan Wilson of the Royal Veterinary College in London and his colleagues spent 10 years perfecting a radio collar equipped with GPS, as well as gyroscopes, magnetometers, and accelerometers for detecting when a cheetah speeds up, slows down, or turns. The collars incorporated solar batteries, as well as a nonrechargeable backup battery, and, for part of the experiment, were programmed to turn on only when a cheetah started to run during times of the day when it was known to hunt. These features all extended the life of the collar to at least a year, enabling the collection of an unprecedented amount of data about each animal.

When activated, the collar records the animal's position, velocity, and direction it's heading up to 300 times a second and relays that data via radio signals to the researchers. Three female and two male cheetahs wore these collars for 18 months, during which 367 hunting "runs" were recorded.

Wilson says that he was surprised how slowly cheetahs went during a hunting run, for example. The fastest hit 106 kilometers per hour, but much of the time the animals topped out at about 60% that speed and maintained that pace for just 1 or 2 seconds as they ran down impala. Instead, hunting success depended on the cheetah's ability to outmaneuver the prey. By slowing down by 4 meters per second in a single stride, the cat could reach its target and then quickly decrease its speed to make sharp turns. The rate of speed up and slow down was double that of polo horses, and they accelerated with four times the power of the fastest human sprinters, Wilson and his colleagues report online today in Nature. They observed, based on downtime recorded after a hunt, that even with this prowess, the cheetah brings down an impala or other game about only one in four tries.

Challenging conventional wisdom, the data also revealed that cheetahs don't restrict their hunting to open grassland or to dawn or early mornings. About half the time they hunted in the open, but about a quarter of the time, they were among shrubs and large trees, and sometimes they even hunted in dense vegetation. Hunting took place during the day as well as at dawn. "What they found out about cheetahs is not what we thought," Carrier notes.

He and other researchers are impressed with the quantity and detail of the information that Wilson was able to collect. "It's the life and death struggle of the speedsters of the savanna," says Thomas Roberts, a biomechanist at Brown University. "And it is all recorded digitally, live, with technology that allows you to watch the animal's path on a Google map. This kind of technology has the potential to transform our understanding of animal behavior" and better plan conservation and management of animals.

Having day-in and day-out data for individual animals over months "is such a giant leap forward," Carrier says. "During my career, we've always had information from lab studies and anecdotal accounts of what's happening in the real world," that sometimes didn't turn out to be correct. But the collars collected enough information that Wilson and his colleagues could quantify the different behaviors. Carrier hopes to see other species studied this way, including prey. Wilson is now following lions, wild dogs, and even domestic cats with these collars.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/06/cheetah-agility-more-important-t.html