In 2003, the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) agreed to fund a project to sequence the entire genome of a boxer dog named Tasha. Although the USA is a country of dog lovers, with approximately 38 million households owning one or more dogs, why did one of the National Institutes of Health countenance the use of 30 m dollars for such a purpose? The answer is that the NHGRI reco...

Threeto 4-month-old infants show asymmetric exclusivity in the acquisition of cat and dog perceptual categories. The cat perceptual category excludes dog exemplars, but the dog perceptual category does not exclude cat exemplars. We describe a connectionist autoencoder model of perceptual categorization that shows the same asymmetries as infants. The model predicts the presence of asymmetric ret...

Given appropriate representations of the semantic relations between carpenter and wood and between mason and stone (for example, vectors in a vector space model), a suitable algorithm should be able to recognize that these relations are highly similar (carpenter is to wood as mason is to stone; the relations are analogous). Likewise, with representations of dog, house, and kennel, an algorithm ...

BACKGROUND Dog ownership has been suggested to encourage physical activity in older adults and may enhance resilience to poor environmental conditions. This study investigates the role of dog ownership and walking as a means of supporting the maintenance of physical activity in older adults during periods of inclement weather. METHODS The analysis used data from the European Prospective Inves...

Despite being considered a neglected, re-emerging and the most widespread zoonotic disease worldwide, human-dog leptospirosis has not been subjected to One Health approach, neither were its socioeconomic environmental risk factors, as well concomitant spatial analysis over time. Accordingly, notified human cases, incidence rate urban hotspot areas, in addition systematic review of dog performed...

Australia is underprepared for a rabies incursion due to a lack of information about how a rabies outbreak would spread within the susceptible canine populations and which control strategies would be best to control it. The aim of this study was to collect information to parameterize a recently developed dog rabies spread model as well as use this information to gauge how the community would ac...

When pit bull-type dogs are seized in an investigation of organized dogfighting, heavily scarred dogs are often assumed to be highly dog aggressive due to a history of fighting. These dogs may be deemed dangerous and euthanized based on scarring alone. We analyzed our existing data on dogs seized from four dogfighting investigations, examining the relationship between the dogs' scars with aggre...

We examined several characteristics of black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) colonies in Phillips County, Montana, including slope, aspect, soils, land tenure, and distance from roads using a geographic information system (GIs). Colonies exhibited significantly smaller slopes, but not significantly different aspects than did randomly located polygons. In addition, colonies were more p...