'Dogs mirror owners' personalities'

Researchers in Austria say dogs can mirror the anxiety and negativity of owners.

And dogs that are relaxed and friendly can pass this on to humans, perhaps helping their owners cope with stress.

More than 100 dogs and their owners underwent various tests, including measurement of heart rate and their response to threat.

Saliva samples were also taken to measure cortisol levels, a marker for stress.

The owners were then assessed for the big five hallmarks of personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

The personality of dogs was also assessed with a questionnaire.

Dr Iris Schoberl, of the University of Vienna, said both owners and dogs influenced each other's coping mechanisms, with the human partner being more influential than the dog.

"Our results nicely fit to experience from practice: owners and dogs are social dyads [a group of two], and they influence each other's stress coping," she told BBC News.

She said dogs are sensitive to their owners' emotional states and may mirror their emotions.

Dogs have lived alongside humans for more than 30,000 years.

Evidence shows they can pick up emotional information from people and adjust their behaviour accordingly.

Source: BBC

SpaceX founder Elon Musk outlines plans to colonize Mars in 2022

Humans will be able to travel to Mars from the year 2022 on a spaceship carrying between 100 and 200 people every 26 months, entrepreneur Elon Musk announced at the 67th International Astronautical Congress meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Anyone with "a few days of training" can travel to the Red Planet for an estimated cost of between $100,000 and $200,000, depending on the luggage, the founder of aerospace firm SpaceX said Tuesday.

Source: EFE

Hawking: We won't survive another 1000 years without escaping Earth

Physicist Stephen Hawking warned on Wednesday that we must continue traveling to space to secure a future for humanity.

Hawking said he did not believe that we will be capable of surviving another 1000 years without escaping "beyond our fragile planet."

Source: EFE

Promising lab-grown skin sprouts hair and grows glands

Starting with stem cells made from a mouse's gums, they managed to craft skin with multiple layers - as well as hair follicles and glands.

When implanted into a "nude mouse" with a suppressed immune system, it integrated well and sprouted hairs.

Researchers say this success will take 5-10 years to translate into humans.

But eventually, the team hopes their system will lead to perfectly functioning, lab-grown skin that can be grown from the cells of burns victims and transplanted back on to them.

Personalised organs

This would be vastly superior to the culturing and grafting techniques that are currently available, which produce skin without many of the the biological components and functionality that we are used to.

The technique could also be adapted to manufacture realistic skin samples that drug or cosmetics companies could use to test their products - instead of using animals.

The findings, reported in the journal Science Advances, have been greeted with enthusiasm by other scientists working in this field.

Takashi Tsuji is the paper's senior author. He said the dream of re-growing personalised organs was beginning to materialise:

"Up until now, artificial skin development has been hampered by the fact that the skin lacked the important organs, such as hair follicles and exocrine glands, which allow the skin to play its important role in regulation.

"With this new technique, we have successfully grown skin that replicates the function of normal tissue.

"We are coming ever closer to the dream of being able to recreate actual organs in the lab for transplantation."

Dr Tsuji, from the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, conducted the research with colleagues in Tokyo, Sagamihara and Sendai.

They began their experiments by taking cells from the gums of a mouse and converting them into "induced pluripotent stem cells" or iPSCs.

It's recapitulating normal skin architecture
Prof John Mcgrath, King's College London

This is a popular and promising technique in stem cell research, discovered in 2006, which bathes the cells in chemicals to "wind back the clock". The resulting is cells, like those of an embryo, which can divide again and again and turn into nearly any other type of cell in the body.

But the team's mastery came in coaxing these cells to form the different layers and structures of deeply layered skin - the "integumentary organ" that protects our bodies, senses touch, regulates heat and does myriad other jobs as well.

Source: BBC

Age of 'Hobbit' species revised

The discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003 caused a sensation because it seemed the creature could have been alive in the quite recent past.

But a new analysis indicates the little hominin probably went extinct at least 50,000 years ago - not the 12,000 years ago initially thought to be the case.

Researchers report their revised assessment in the journal Nature.

Prof Bert Roberts, from the University of Wollongong, Australia, says the revised dating actually resolves what had always been a head-scratcher: how it was possible for floresiensis to survive for 30,000 to 40,000 years after modern humans are believed to have passed through Indonesia.

"Well, it now seems we weren't living alongside this little species for very long, if at all. And once again it smells of modern humans having a role in the downfall of yet another pieces," he told BBC News.

"Every time modern humans arrived somewhere new, it tended to be bad news for the endemic fauna. Things would go pear-shaped pretty quickly."

This does not mean we necessarily killed the Hobbits; it may just have been that we made life miserable for them.

Modern humans could have outcompeted the little people for the best food resources and land, for example.

The Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores where the Hobbit fossils were unearthed continues to be investigated.

The intervening years have seen researchers dig down through new areas, to get a better picture of how the sediments are structured.

It now transpires that the first floresiensis specimens were lodged just below an unconformity - a missing, eroded layer of material.

The absence of this sediment made the context of the 2003 find appear younger than it actually was.

Various dating technologies have subsequently been applied to the contents of the cave to help build a new time sequence.

This points to the skeletal remains of floresiensis being between about 100,000 and 60,000 years old.

"But then we have some stone tools that were 50,000 years old and these were very likely made by Hobbits," explained Prof Roberts.

"We say 'very likely', not because they were small stone tools able to fit in their hands, but because they were made from a volcanic rock called silicified tuff, which they seemed to prefer.

"When modern humans came through that region, we used stone tools made of chert, for example.

"So, 50,000 years ago is when the Hobbits disappear, as far as we can determine. But then we haven't excavated the whole cave yet."

One of the key implications of the new dating is that it fells one of the early counter-theories about the origin of the Hobbits - that they might not have been a separate species but merely a diseased form of modern human.

But if the Hobbits were living on Flores 100,000 years ago, this view is no longer tenable: no modern humans have been recorded in south-east Asia so far back in time.

Prof Chris Stringer, from the Natural History Museum in London, UK, is an expert on ancient humans.

He agrees that the new research helps straighten out the story of the Hobbits, and makes it much more likely that we were indeed involved in their extinction somehow.

"The other fascinating and tricky thing to think about is the possibility of interbreeding. We know modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans (other archaic human species), so could they have got together with floresiensis? Are there people on Earth today who have a little bit of Hobbit DNA in them? You couldn't rule it out."

Source:BBC

Earliest evidence of humans in Ireland

The bone shows clear signs of cut marks with stone tools, and has been radiocarbon dated to 12,500 years ago.

This places humans in Ireland in the Palaeolithic era; previously, the earliest evidence of people came from the Mesolithic, after 10,000 years ago.

The brown bear bone had been stored in a cardboard box at the National Museum of Ireland for almost a century.
Since the 1970s, the oldest evidence of human occupation in Ireland has been the hunter-gatherer settlement of
Mount Sandel on the banks of the River Bann, County Derry, which dates to 8,000 years ago.

Antiquarians and scientists have been searching for an Irish Palaeolithic since the second half of the 19th Century.

Over this 150-year period, occasional Palaeolithic tools have surfaced but in each case have been dismissed as objects originating from Britain that had simply been carried along by ice sheets or other geological processes.

During the Palaeolithic, Ireland was already an island, cut off from the rest of northwest Europe, so nomadic hunter-gatherer groups would have arrived by boat.

The brown bear patella - or knee bone - dates to a time at the end of the Ice Age when the climate was considerably colder.

In addition to brown bears, humans would have come into contact with - and possibly hunted - giant deer, red deer, reindeer, hare and wolves.

The discovery was made by Dr Marion Dowd, an archaeologist at IT Sligo; and Dr Ruth Carden, from the National Museum of Ireland.

"Archaeologists have been searching for the Irish Palaeolithic since the 19th Century, and now, finally, the first piece of the jigsaw has been revealed. This find adds a new chapter to the human history of Ireland," said Dr Dowd.

The adult bear bone was one of thousands of bones originally discovered in Alice and Gwendoline Cave, County Clare, in 1903. The excavators published a report on their investigations and noted that the bear bone had knife marks.

The bone has been stored in a collection at the National Museum of Ireland since the 1920s.

In 2010 and 2011, Dr Carden re-analysed and documented the museum's animal bone collection. As a specialist in cave archaeology, Dr Dowd became interested in the bone from the butchered bear and the two scientists sought to carry out radiocarbon dating of the Chrono Centre at Queen's University Belfast.

"When a Palaeolithic date was returned, it came as quite a shock. Here we had evidence of someone butchering a brown bear carcass and cutting through the knee probably to extract the tendons," said Dr Dowd.

The examinations determined that the cut marks were made on fresh bone, confirming they were of the same date as the patella, and therefore that humans were in Ireland during the Palaeolithic period.

"This made sense as the location of the marks spoke of someone trying to cut through the tough knee joint, perhaps someone who was inexperienced," explains Dr Dowd.

"In their repeated attempts, they left seven marks on the bone surface. The implement used would probably have been something like a long flint blade."

Source: BBC

How extinct humans left their mark on us

Denisovan DNA lives on only in Pacific island dwellers, while Neanderthal genes are more widespread, researchers report in the journal Science.

Meanwhile, some parts of our genetic code show little trace of our extinct cousins.

They include hundreds of genes involved in brain development and language.

"These are big, truly interesting regions," said co-researcher Dr Joshua Akey, an expert on human evolutionary genetics from the University of Washington Medicine, US.

"It will be a long, hard slog to fully understand the genetic differences between humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals in these regions and the traits they influence."

Siberia cave

Studies of nuclear DNA (the instructions to build a human) are particularly useful in the case of Denisovans, which are largely missing from the fossil record.

The prehistoric species was discovered less than a decade ago through genetic analysis of a finger bone unearthed in a cave in northern Siberia.

Substantial amounts of Denisovan DNA have been detected in the genomes of only a handful of modern-day human populations so far.

"The genes that we found of Denisovans are only in this one part of the world [Oceania] that's very far away from that Siberian cave," Dr Akey told BBC News.

Where the ancestors of modern humans might have had physical contact with Denisovans is a matter of debate, he added.

Source: BBC