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Chewing bones is a favorite pastime of dogs. If a bone is very beloved, the dog might even bury it.
To humans, this behavior may seem odd, so why do dogs invest so much energy in burying their prized possessions?
“The reason why a dog buries something is to save it for later,” Teoti Anderson, professional dog trainer and behavior consultant based in Florida, told Live Science. “When you don’t know when you’ll find your next meal, it makes sense to hide leftovers.”
Related: Are dogs really smiling at us?
The act of burying bones is a type of “food caching,” that is, storing available food supplies for the purpose of later access. It’s a common behavior in many species of birds and mammals, including in the canine ancestors of domestic dogs — gray wolves — which is where dogs inherited their burying instincts.
While wolves, which are known for their cunning hunting skills, tend to stay in a scavenge area long enough to devour their prey entirely, they will occasionally carry and bury the remains of a kill, according to a 1976 study published in the journal Ethology. (Wolves and other canids are known as “scatter hoarders,” meaning they stash their leftover food in hideaways located over fairly large areas.) This same study showed that even wolf pups cache, and will move their cache to keep it from being discovered by a sibling. So, when dogs exhibit this seemingly unusual behavior in your backyard, rest assured — they’re simply following their instinctual “inner wolf.”
Most dogs today don’t need to store food because they have doting pet parents to feed them, but that doesn’t mean their natural urge to squirrel things away for later doesn’t still exist. Sometimes, the instinct to bury things has nothing to do with storing food or protecting it from scavengers. According to dog behaviorist Cesar Millan, burying can be a dog’s way of savoring cherished objects, so they can be enjoyed again later. It can also be a way for bored dogs to initiate play with their owner, or a method of stress relief for anxious dogs.
Meanwhile, some breeds, such as terriers, are simply more prone to digging, whether to bury food or to burrow holes for no specific reason at all. “Dogs specifically bred to hunt or chase critters into their dens often like to bury toys, bones and treats,” Anderson said. “So, it’s not uncommon to see a Dachshund burying a bone under the couch pillows.” Anderson added that if a dog doesn’t have a burying instinct, it shouldn’t be cause for concern.
Dogs that do “cache” seem to visit their hoards whenever the mood hits. “Some dogs stash a treat and then ignore it for a week. Some dogs seem indecisive and move their prize 20 times before settling on one [spot]. And other dogs bury a bone and forget it altogether,” Anderson said.
If a dog doesn’t retrieve a treasure, you can bet it isn’t because it forgot its whereabouts. Dogs have an incredibly keen sense of smell, about 10,000 to 100,000 times as powerful as that of humans, according to research in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, so remembering their hideaways is rarely ever an issue.
Besides bones, what types of things do dogs like to bury? Anderson told Live Science it runs the gamut. “I once knew a dog who would bury rocks. I have no idea why these rocks were so special, but they were special to him.”
The carcass of an enormous finback whale (Balaenoptera physalus) was discovered near the Italian port of Sorrento earlier this week, the Italian Coast Guard said in a Facebook post.
Officials discovered the carcass on Sunday (Jan. 17), before towing it to the nearby port at Naples. The whale measured about 65 feet (20 meters) long and likely weighed more than 77 tons (70 metric tons) — likely making the corpse “one of the largest” ever found in the Mediterranean Sea, according to the agency.
Coast Guard divers first discovered the whale after a young calf swam into the Sorrento harbor in a state of distress, according to news reports. The calf reportedly rammed its head into the harbor walls several times before retreating back underwater; when divers followed it, they discovered the fin whale’s corpse.
Related: Images of whales: giants of the deep
The calf is presumed to be the dead whale’s offspring, and the Coast Guard is monitoring for signs of the young whale’s return. Meanwhile, marine biologists in Naples are working to ascertain what killed the whale.
Finback whales (also known as fin whales) are the second-largest animals on Earth, after the iconic blue whale. Finbacks can grow to be 85 feet (25 m) long and weigh up to 80 tons (72 metric tons), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They are considered endangered after commercial whaling decimated the global finback population over the last century.
Today, commercial whaling is illegal throughout most of the world, and boat strikes pose the biggest threat to finbacks, according to NOAA.
Shiveluch volcano has had more than 40 violent eruptions over the last 10,000 years. The last gigantic blast occurred in 1964, creating a new crater and covering an area of nearly 100 square kilometers with pyroclastic flows. But Shiveluch is actually currently erupting, as it has been for over 20 years. Credit: Michael Krawczynski, Washington University in St. Louis
There isn’t much in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula in northeastern Russia just across the Bering Sea from Alaska, besides an impressive population of brown bears and the most explosive volcano in the world.
Kamchatka’s Shiveluch volcano has had more than 40 violent eruptions over the last 10,000 years. The last gigantic blast occurred in 1964, creating a new crater and covering an area of nearly 100 square kilometers with pyroclastic flows. But Shiveluch is actually currently erupting, as it has been for over 20 years. So why would anyone risk venturing too close?
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis, including Michael Krawczynski, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences and graduate student Andrea Goltz, brave the harsh conditions on Kamchatka because understanding what makes Shiveluch tick could help scientists understand the global water cycle and gain insights into the plumbing systems of other volcanoes.
In a recent study published in the journal Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, researchers from the Krawczynski lab looked at small nodules of primitive magma that were erupted and preserved amid other materials.
“The minerals in these nodules retain the signatures of what was happening early in the magma’s evolution, deep in Earth’s crust,” said Goltz, the lead author of the paper.
The researchers found that the conditions inside Shiveluch include roughly 10%-14% water by weight (wt%). Most volcanoes have less than 1% water. For subduction zone volcanoes, the average is usually 4%, rarely exceeding 8 wt%, which is considered superhydrous.
Of particular interest is a mineral called amphibole, which acts as a proxy or fingerprint for high water content at known temperature and pressure. The unique chemistry of the mineral tells researchers how much water is present deep underneath Shiveluch.
“When you convert the chemistry of these two minerals, amphibole and olivine, into temperatures and water contents as we do in this paper, the results are remarkable both in terms of how much water and how low a temperature we’re recording,” Krawczynski said.
“The only way to get primitive, pristine materials at low temperatures is to add lots and lots of water,” he said. “Adding water to rock has the same effect as adding salt to ice; you’re lowering the melting point. In this case, there is so much water that the temperature is reduced to a point where amphiboles can crystallize.”
Water drives explosive eruptions: Magma is wetter than we thought
More information:
Andrea E. Goltz et al, Evidence for superhydrous primitive arc magmas from mafic enclaves at Shiveluch volcano, Kamchatka, Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s00410-020-01746-5
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Wet and wild: There’s lots of water in the world’s most explosive volcano (2021, January 23)
retrieved 23 January 2021
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The demonstrations kicked off in Russia’s far east city of Vladivostok and spread to the west as the day progressed. Videos posted on social media showed crowds of people gathered in Vladivostok and a number of cities across Siberia and central Russia.
One video showed a small protest in the city of Yakutsk, where temperatures dropped to -53 degrees Celsius (- 63 Fahrenheit) on Saturday.
The demonstrations have not received an official government permit and the authorities have warned people not to attend them.
Several allies of Navalny have been detained this week for inciting the protests, including his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh, Anti-Corruption Foundation investigator Georgy Alburov and opposition activist Lyubov Sobol.
The coordinator of Navalny’s Moscow office, Oleg Stepanov, was detained on Saturday, according to a tweet from Navalny’s Moscow team. A protest in the Russian capital was due to start at 2 p.m. local time (6 a.m ET).
The Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs has accused the United States of encouraging the protests after the US Embassy in Russia posted an alert on its website advising US citizens to avoid the demonstrations.
In a tweet posted on Saturday, the ministry said that posting information about the rallies was “in line with Washington’s provocative policy of encouraging protests in countries whose governments are seen by US as undesirable.”
Under Russian law, an official appeal for approval of a protest has to be made to local authorities at least 10 days before the event. Navalny was only arrested less than a week ago, so the organizers had insufficient time to launch an appeal.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport late Sunday, just moments after arriving from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from Novichok poisoning he blamed on the Russian government. The Kremlin repeatedly denied any involvement.
On Monday, he faced an unexpected hearing where a judge ordered Navalny to remain in custody for 30 days ahead of a court hearing to determine whether he had violated the terms of his suspended sentence in a 2014 embezzlement case, which he claims was politically motivated.
Russian internet regulator said Thursday it was planning to fine major social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, for “spreading information prohibited by law and aimed at attracting minors to participate in unauthorized mass public events.”
CNN’s Fred Pleitgen, Zahra Ullah and Anna Chernova in Moscow contributed reporting.
The U.S. Treasury Department must grant former President Trump’s lawyers a 72-hour warning if it allows his tax returns to be released to Democrats, a judge ruled Friday, according to a report.
U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is still seeking the returns after he was refused access to them in 2019 by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who claimed Democrats didn’t have a “legitimate legislative purpose” for the request, Politico reported.
Neal had cited a law that requires the Treasury to turn over tax documents at the request of House tax committees.
Democrats sued in federal court in a case that is still pending a year and a half later.
NEW YORK TIMES AND TRUMP TAXES: WHY IT’S NOT A CAMPAIGN BOMBSHELL
Washington, D.C., District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, put the two-week order in place because the Treasury Department could reverse course under the new Biden administration.
He also ordered both sides to give a status report on Feb. 3.
The nomination of President Biden’s Treasury secretary pick, former Federal Reserve boss Janet Yellen, was unanimously approved by the Senate Finance Committee on Friday and now heads to the full Senate for a vote Monday.
WHO IS JANET YELLEN, BIDEN’S PICK TO LEAD THE TREASURY?
Douglas Letter, general counsel for the House, told McFadden in the hearing that Treasury has a “clear legal obligation” to turn over the documents that Democrats still want even though he’s out of office, according to Politico. “Our feeling is enough is enough. The statute is clear,” he said.
It’s unclear if the Treasury Department under Biden will allow the House access to the returns.
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Democrats and the district attorney of New York City are also seeking his tax returns in separate cases.
It was 2020 when Sony surprised the world, or at least the CES attendees, with a show car. Called the Vision-S Concept, it’s an electric sedan that aims to drive itself and with the tech giant behind the project, we could say that more than a handful of people were hopeful that it would reach production.
A year later, Sony showcased the Vision-S to the public again, but this time in a public road testing in Europe, which naturally sparked hope among production version hopefuls. Sony is indeed in constant development of the concept, but it won’t reach production – not as a Sony-branded car anyway.
18Photos
That revelation came from a Sony spokesperson who told Car and Driver that the company “have no plans to mass-produce or sell the vehicle.”
So, yes, no matter how beautifully-designed the Vision-S Concept was, it’s just a testbed for future automobile technologies, particularly in terms of safety and reliability in autonomous driving, as well as enhancing in-car entertainment and overall experience.
The Vision-S Concept currently has Level 2+ autonomous vehicle capabilities, limited to adaptive cruise control, a self-parking system, and automatic lane changing. Obviously, the tech giant isn’t stopping there, with Level 4 in its sight.
In terms of technology, the Vision-S Concept also touts a sophisticated stereo with the company’s 360 Reality Audio system, creating a sphere of sound per person. Of course, with 5G connection on board, playing video games while on the road is a must.
Imaging, optics, and entertainment, among others – Sony is showing us that its technologies can transcend to automobiles. Don’t be surprised if one day a self-driving EV will arrive with Sony components. When that happens, you should remember there was once a good-looking Sony-branded car that catered its development.
When Andi Owen took over the furniture company Herman Miller, in 2018, she didn’t expect to get caught up in politics. But these days, it seems no chief executive is safe from the culture wars.
Over the last year, Ms. Owen, a former executive at the Gap, has had to mollify a work force shaken by the same polarizing forces straining the nation. On her factory floor in the battleground state of Michigan, wardrobe choices — from Make America Great Again hats to Black Lives Matter T-shirts — have provoked arguments among employees. In response, Ms. Owen has tried to hold together a company already tested by the pandemic and slumping sales.
“We’ve tried to create opportunities for people to have frank conversations, for them to get together and discuss the hard topics of the day,” she said. “I don’t think these are new problems. But whether it’s about race, or inclusiveness, or whether it’s about what’s happening in the world today, these are all things you have to talk about.”
At the same time, Ms. Owen has been steering Herman Miller through a pandemic that closed offices worldwide — an existential threat to a company that makes office furniture and owns Design Within Reach, an upscale retailer.
Ms. Owen went to Interlochen Arts Academy, a Michigan boarding school focused on the arts. It was there that she first learned about Herman Miller, which produces iconic pieces by famous midcentury designers such as Isamu Noguchi and Charles and Ray Eames, and modern office staples like the Aeron chair.
Ms. Owen then studied art history at the College of William and Mary, and started working in retail. A job at The Gap led to a series of senior roles at the retailer, culminating in her leadership of the Banana Republic brand, before she moved to Herman Miller.
This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
Did getting a liberal arts degree have an impact on your career?
It’s helped me in a lot of ways. I learned a lot about people. I learned a lot about history. I learned a lot about observation. I’ve always approached any job I’ve ever had as a generalist and an observer of human nature.
Some people would say I’m not good at any one thing. I’m sort of OK at a lot of things. And that’s OK. I’ve surrounded myself with people that are a lot smarter than me. But I have a little bit of a broader point of view, and an experience that doesn’t necessarily pigeonhole me into thinking one thing or another.
I had a mom who was an educator and a dad who is this free spirit musician. And all my mom ever said to me was, “When you go to school, learn what you love. You’ll have plenty of time for a career and it won’t matter anyway.” So I really did spend time doing what I loved, and I think it’s been an advantage.
Unlike a lot of C.E.O.s, you never got an M.B.A.
I actually applied and got accepted. I was in my late 30s, and as I was talking to a woman in admissions and she said, “It’s great. We don’t have that many middle-aged women that are interested in these programs because they’re all having families.” And I was like, “Not me. I’m good.” And then of course I got pregnant and didn’t go.
You get to a certain point in your career where getting a standard M.B.A. is a little bit of a waste of time, because you’ve learned too much along the way. But I went back and got an executive M.B.A. at Harvard, which kind of filled in the gaps.
The Gap has obviously had its ups and downs. What did the company get right, and what did it get wrong over the years?
Business & Economy
I was fortunate enough to be there for the really, really good years, when the stock was splitting every year. And I was there to watch the decline.
The Gap was at its best back in the day when the trusted editor was important, when you played a role helping people understand what they needed. We had a lot of success early on. But when you’re super successful and you don’t change, you get afraid. That ability to take risks — to think about how the company could be different, to reinvent yourself from the inside — it became impossible. And a lot of great people got fed into the wood chipper trying to bring The Gap back.
When the digital revolution hit I went into the online part of our business. And I remember one of my bosses telling me, “No one will ever buy clothes online. This is going to be the biggest mistake of your career. What are you doing?” That really was the way people were thinking back then.
We just didn’t change fast enough. And we were really out of touch with the customer. When you rely on a playbook that was successful in the past, and you don’t understand where your customer is going, it’s a prescription for disaster.
How did your time at The Gap shape your thinking about what you do at Herman Miller?
I interviewed a guy who became my head of digital. He had worked in retail, and he said, “Do you know what excites me most about coming to this industry? I feel like I’m going from making landfill to making heirlooms.”
I feel similarly. These are products that you hope you’re going to hand down. With some of the Banana Republic cashmere sweaters I made, I hope somebody hands those down. But I know the millions and millions of T-shirts we made probably aren’t getting handed down.
What happened when the pandemic hit, and how did you find your way out of it?
We’d never closed down our plants before, and there we were all of a sudden. We shut down all of our plants in 12 hours, and every day was a new lesson in crisis management.
There have been nights when I have sat down at the end of the day and shed a few tears because of it. The human toll from this pandemic has been not just the death toll, but people’s lives and jobs, whole industries wiped out. We capped out at 400 layoffs and people who opted out [about 5 percent of the work force], and we’ve done our best to keep that number where it is. But we’ve also designed a new product in times that we never thought we could. So it’s been a real balance of, “Hey, right now is really crappy,” and, “We’re going to get through it.”
Your core business has held up surprisingly well during the pandemic. Who is buying so much office furniture right now?
Our international business is strong. The parts of the world that have gotten out of the pandemic — certain parts of Asia, New Zealand — they’ve moved on.
Now the biggest questions that C.E.O.s and people that are planning space have are: “Hey, what does the distributed work force look like? What does my new office need to look like?” It certainly can’t be what it was. People don’t want employees to come back to what it was.
At first it was, “How do I make it safe? How do I put barriers everywhere?” Now the conversation has evolved to, “How do I make it a compelling environment?”
What are some of the answers to that question?
It is a fascinating variety. Financial companies are like, “We’re coming back to exactly what it was. We’re not going to change much of anything.” And then some of the tech companies in Silicon Valley are like, “Who needs an office ever again?”
I’m not sure either one of those are necessarily the answer. Along that continuum, most people are landing in a place of, “Gosh, what do people miss?” So whether that’s innovation, creativity or collaboration, how do you create environments where people can have those kinds of things? Depending on the industry, I think we’re going to see a whole lot of different solutions in this first year or two.
At Herman Miller, we’re taking all of our office environments and using this time while we have people working remotely to completely renovate them. They’re our own little test labs.
Herman Miller isn’t an inherently political company, so how do you deal with a moment like this, when there is so much rancor, including among your own employees?
We have got to unify, we’ve got to talk. We have to have respect and kindness and we have to listen. What happened at the Capitol was not OK. On the other hand, I have to make sure that we’re listening to one another, and are trying to find commonality.
Sometimes I yearn for the days when I was back in Berkeley, Calif., and I could walk down the street and everybody thought the same way. But you know, everybody is in Michigan. So you have to make the folks on the right feel comfortable, and you have to make the folks on the left feel comfortable. That’s a challenge as we get more and more divisive as a society. Sometimes you have to agree to disagree because you’re so far apart. But for us, it’s been about encouraging respect and encouraging kindness.
Scientists have discovered how dinosaurs peed, pooed and had sex thanks to a 130 million year old fossil.
The findings from the fossil found in Liaoning, China over 20 years ago were detailed in a study.
The paper focuses on the cloaca or posterior orifice of the Psittacosaurus dinosaur.
Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Scientists have discovered how dinosaurs peed, pooed, and had sex for the first time, thanks to 130 million-year-old Chinese fossil.
A study published in Current Biology detailed their findings on the discovery first made in Liaoning, China, over 20 years ago.
The paper is entitled, ‘A cloacal opening in a non-avian dinosaur.’ It focuses on the cloaca or posterior orifice of the Psittacosaurus dinosaur, which lived during the Cretaceous period that began around 145 million years ago and ended around 65 million years ago.
Lead author, Dr. Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist from the University of Bristol, told Insider: “I discovered the cloaca was preserved, that we could reconstruct it and that this would be interesting in 2016.
“We realized that nobody has ever described a dinosaur cloaca before, and very few people have looked at what a cloaca and cloacal opening looks like from the outside among living animals.
“The cloaca is used for everything: peeing, pooping, laying eggs, copulation. It’s basically the Swiss army knife of orifices, it can do everything but eating and breathing,” Dr. Vinther continued.
Cloaca in the fossil of the Psittacosaurus dinosaur.
Dr. Jakob Vinther
With Professor Diane Kelly from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an expert on cloaca and animal penises, and paleoartist Bob Nicholls, he created a 3D dinosaur model.
Dr. Vinther added: “The dinosaur is about the height of a Labrador, is covered in scaly skin, and has strange bristles coming off its tail. It’s a relative of some big, herbivorous dinosaurs like the Triceratops, which has horns and a frill. However, this fella has some horns on the side of its cheeks and kind of looks like ET. It’s quite cute.”
Read More: A VC who just raised $30 million shares how he’s placing his bets on biology ‘eating the whole world’
Dr. Vinther said the sex of the dinosaur remains unknown since in animals with a cloaca, the penis is hidden inside and in this particular case, the external features don’t reveal much about that.
He added: “Dinosaurs are ancestors of birds. Birds are a group of dinosaurs that survived, so we had to look and see what they have.
“Because many groups of birds have lost their penises except for ducks, ostriches, and their relatives, birds do something called cloacal kissing where they put their cloacas together and vibrate really fast. So when birds mate, that’s typically what’s going on.”
Fossil of the Psittacosaurus dinosaur.
Dr. Jakob Vinther
Crocodiles are also dinosaur ancestors with penises. With that information, the scientists were able to extrapolate that if some of the deepest branches of birds in the tree of life have penises, then dinosaurs, such as the Psittacosaurus, probably have penises too.
Dr. Vinther said: “We can actually say for sure that they have a penis because the shape of this cloaca would not be particularly good for cloacal kissing. It’s a cloaca that is good for penetrative sex.”
“We could see its color patterns, which suggests this cloaca was used for visual singling, so that means that they would been showing off their cloaca like ‘Hey, hey, check this out!’ So one of the things that we have a little glimpse into here is a glorious past where dinosaurs were engaged in cloacal signaling to attract mates,” he continued.
The Psittacosaurus fossil is currently on display at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.
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Legal sales of recreational marijuana in Arizona started on Friday, a once-unthinkable step in the former conservative stronghold that joins 14 other states that have broadly legalized pot.
The state Health Services Department on Friday announced it had approved 86 licenses in nine of the state’s 15 counties under provisions of the marijuana legalization measure passed by voters in November. Most of the licenses went to existing medical marijuana dispensaries that can start selling pot right away.
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“It’s an exciting step for those that want to participate in that program,” said Dr. Cara Christ, Arizona’s state health director, on Friday.
Under the terms of Proposition 207, people 21 and older can grow their own plants and legally possess up to an ounce (28 grams) of marijuana or a smaller quantity of “concentrates” such as hashish. Possession of between 1 ounce and 2.5 ounces (70 grams) is a petty offense carrying a maximum $300 fine.
The march toward decriminalization in the Sun Belt state was long. Approval of the legalization measure came four years after Arizona voters narrowly defeated a similar proposal, although medical marijuana has been legal in the state since 2010.
The initiative faced stiff opposition from Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and GOP leaders in the state Legislature, but 60% of the state’s voters in the November election approved it.
The vote on marijuana reflected larger trends at play during the historic election that saw Democrat Joe Biden flip the longtime Republican state where political giants include five-term conservative senator Barry Goldwater and the late GOP Sen. John McCain.
DEAL OFFERS MORE BANKING SERVICES FOR CALIFORNIA POT FIRMS
Changing demographics, including a fast-growing Latino population and a flood of new residents, have made the state friendlier to Democrats.
The recreational pot measure was backed by advocates for the legal marijuana industry and criminal justice reform advocates who argued that the state’s harsh marijuana laws were out of step with the nation. Arizona was the only state in the country that still allowed a felony charge for first-time possession of small amounts of marijuana, although most cases were prosecuted as lower-level misdemeanors.
MARIJUANA STOCKS BOOM WITH NEW HOPES FOR LEGALIZATION AS DEMOCRATS TAKE POWER
The vast majority of the licenses issued Friday were in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county that’s home to Phoenix and its suburbs. Other counties with dispensaries now allowed to sell recreational pot are Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Pima, Pinal, Yavapai and Yuma counties.
Voters in New Jersey, South Dakota and Montana also approved making possession of recreational marijuana legal last November.
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Arizona prosecutors dropped thousands of marijuana possession cases after the measure was approved. Possession in the state technically became legal when the election results were certified on Nov. 30 but there was no authorized way to purchase it without a medical marijuana card.
Voters in November dealt another blow to Republicans in control of the state’s power levers when they approved a new tax on high earners to boost education funding, a move that came after years of GOP tax cuts and the underfunding of public schools.
