Health & Science

Testing your dog’s smarts

Do you think your dog is smarter or more empathetic than other dogs? Now there’s an online testing site that can tell you for sure—and in the process help scientists crowdsource data about the canine mind. Brian Hare, a professor of animal cognition at Duke University, created the site, called Dognition.com, in hopes of identifying the “cognitive style” that makes for the best service dogs. Currently, less than a third of dogs that go through extensive training to be bomb sniffers or guides for the blind succeed. Figuring out the cognitive strengths of different breeds could improve that percentage, and help all dog trainers sharpen their teaching methods. Most animals, including chimpanzees and wolves, are blind to much human body language; pointing to where a treat is hidden, for instance, won’t help them find it. But dogs understand human pointing because over thousands of years, we’ve bred them to be highly attuned to our behavior and emotions. When it comes to the kind of survival skills needed in the wild, wolves make dogs “look like idiots,” Hare tells The New York Times. But when it comes to manipulating humans to meet all their needs, he says, dogs are “geniuses.” Data from Dognition has already shown that dogs that have the strongest bonds with their owners are also good at deceiving them: The pooches watch the humans closely for opportunities to steal extra food.

A remedy for existential angst

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If thinking about your own death freaks you out, there may be an over-the-counter solution. A new study shows that the main ingredient in Tylenol, acetaminophen, can help calm existential dread in the same way it reduces the physical pain of a headache. To get volunteers worried about their own mortality, University of British Columbia researchers asked them to watch scenes from the surreal David Lynch film Rabbits, or to write several paragraphs about what they thought would happen to their bodies when they died. Those who were given Tylenol before engaging in those depressing acts were significantly less upset by them than those who were given a placebo. “We think that Tylenol is blocking existential unease in the same way it prevents pain, because a similar neurological process is responsible for both types of distress,” study author Daniel Randles tells LiveScience.com. Previous studies have shown that a region of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex processes both physical pain and certain kinds of psychological pain.

Stopping the new bird flu

A new strain of avian flu that has infected 108 people and killed 22 in China has sparked a major scientific effort to understand how the viral disease is spreading. “If we want to control this virus, we need to know where it lives and how it’s transmitted,” Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, tells NPR.org. Researchers initially believed that the virus, H7N9, was passing directly from birds to poultry workers, but nearly 40 percent of infected patients say they haven’t handled poultry. The virus lives in birds without sickening them, making infected birds difficult to spot. Only 39 of some 48,000 birds tested for the virus proved to be carriers, a number too small to explain the current outbreak. That suggests the virus may be coming from other animals or, more ominously, passing from person to person. If H7N9 is capable of human-to-human transmission, it has so far only been able to jump between people in close contact, but that could change as the virus evolves. As Taiwan announced the first case outside mainland China last week, WHO official Dr. Keiji Fukuda called H7N9 “definitely one of the most lethal influenza viruses we’ve seen.”

Weight loss on the menu

Posting calories on restaurant menus hasn’t done much to convince diners to order healthier fare and eat less. But a new study has found that labeling food with a different number—the amount of time you would have to briskly walk to burn it off—seems to be effective. Researchers at Texas Christian University gave 300 young adults a menu featuring hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, fries, salads, sodas, and water. A third of the menus had no nutritional labels, a third listed calorie counts for each item, and a third showed the number of minutes of walking it would take to work off each item. The first two groups ordered and ate similarly, but the group that saw how much they would have to exercise to compensate for their choices ordered meals with significantly fewer calories—and then ate less of them. Study author Meena Shah tells NPR.org that more consumers “might think twice’’ about ordering rich foods if they knew the effort required to use up the calories therein. It takes two hours of walking, for instance, to burn off one quarter-pound cheeseburger.