The Globe offers a charming multimedia story about one of life’s great mysteries: How do cats lap up milk? The folks at MIT repurposed a device designed for Space Station experiments and built a mock tongue. Then they went to the zoo. More here.
In terms of dogs, this week’s previously reported “”https://blogs.nature.com/boston/2010/11/09/of-dogs-vaccines-and-epigenetics">Science in the News" program offers two stories: dog science and a “Meetup” group called “Nerd Fun – Boston.”
Meetup is an online network for groups of people with common interests. Someone posts an event, and whoever wants to show up does. About 25 Nerd Fun members sat together in Harvard Med’s packed Armenise Amphitheater for talks on the science of dogs. Several held small signs designed like red and white ID badge stickers with the “Meetup” logo
Assistant organizer and software tester T.J. Maher said members look for events in the “nerdy genre,” which this weekend includes Sunday’s Harry Potter Scavenger Hunt at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the “One Man Star War Trilogy” performance.
The group – with more than 3,000 members — includes experts and amateurs. After the event, they usually go to dinner.“The fun part isn’t just going to the lecture,” Maher told NNB. "… We get people who seem to go to lectures on geology (and) people who are in the field and we can put our heads together and share what we’ve learned.
A search on “science” Meetup groups in the Boston area turns up 40, with interests ranging from Theoretical Computer Science Problem-Solving to Science Street Theater.
The Nerd group, by far the largest, gave the dog science event a high rating.
PowerPoints from those talks are posted here
One speaker, grad student Christine Kiely started out with a slide picturing a dog and a cat. "Let’s get this out of the way,’ she said. “Dog people or cat people?”
She cited a recent study out of University of Texas, Austin that rated participants based on five factor model of human personality.
Results suggest that dog people are higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, but lower on Neuroticism and Openness than are cat people.
She also cited The Family Dog Project (in Hungary) which was established in 1994 as the first research group dedicated to investigate the evolutionary and ethological foundations of dog-human relationship.
Finally, Kiely gingerly touched on the topic: Can dogs smell cancer? Answer? Evidence suggests there might be something to anecdotal reports of dogs sniffing away as humans later diagnosed with the disease.