DailyDirt: Man's Best Friends

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Dogs have been domesticated for thousands of years, and there's been some speculation that humans and dogs have co-evolved to some extent. So it would be nice to understand our domesticated friends a bit better, and technology could help us out. We've seen products like Bowlingual for translating dog barks into human languages, and here are just a few more interesting links on human-dog relationships.

• Researchers are using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to try to understand what dogs are thinking. Two dogs have been trained to stand completely still while their brains are scanned, and one of the dogs is a squirrel-hunting dog -- so maybe these neuroscientists will be able to see what part of a dog's brain activates when someone says, "Squirrel!" [url]
• Doggelganger is a fun way to match up people and dogs that are up for adoption. Dogs and their owners are supposed to grow to look like each other, but what if facial recognition software made it possible for you to adopt a dog that already looked like you from the start? [url]
• Does neutering pets cause any kind of depression for our beloved domesticated animals? Vets may want to change the way they make pets sterile if enough pet owners are convinced that there's even a possibility of post-neutering depression. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: bowlingual, brain, depression, doggelganger, dogs, fmri, neutering, pets