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Post by Deleted on Apr 2, 2019 4:47:16 GMT
 www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/28/nasa-wants-pay-you-19-000-stay-bed-2-months/3298555002/ 60 days in bed for $19,000.
You'll shower, eat and get dressed while laying down.
Study will replicate weightlessness
Slobs of the world, here's a job for you. NASA and two other space agencies are asking for 24 volunteers to lie in bed for two months as part of a study. The pay? About $19,000. "We are looking for test persons to take part in a bed rest study from September to December 2019 in Cologne (Germany) and spend 60 days lying down," according to a statement from the German Aerospace Agency, NASA and the European Space Agency. The point of the study is to "research how the body changes in weightlessness. Bed rest simulates this condition," the statement said. Based on the study results, scientists will develop techniques to reduce the negative effects of weightlessness on astronauts. During the two months, the volunteers will live in a single room, but will be divided into groups. One group will be rotated around in a centrifuge, similar to an artificial gravity chamber, which will force blood back into their extremities, ABC News reported. Volunteers will lie flat in bed for two months in rooms like this. Volunteers will lie flat in bed for two months in rooms like this. (Photo: German Aerospace Agency) A second group will not be moved. A previous study participant, identified as Janja, said that "participation in the study was a very special and good experience for me....What surprised me the most: after a few days my body got used to the bed rest, it was much easier than I had imagined. I did not get bored by the many exciting experiments, on the contrary, time flew by." And when they say you'll do everything while lying down, they aren't kidding: People must eat, exercise, get dressed and even shower while lying flat on their beds. Another catch: The participants’ beds are tilted slightly downward to encourage fluids to pool in the upper body, NBC News said.
edit me : how nice: They left out something..the depends
NASA needs more than brains for a manned Mars mission, University of Florida Professor Jeffrey Johnson said at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference on "Building a Winning Team for Missions to Mars." Buzz60 Farewell to a workhorse:: Mars rover Opportunity officially dead after 15 years The study will take place in a special, state-of-the-art facility known as the "envihab," which comes from the words environment and habitat. Applications for the study are available online from the German Aerospace Agency. The agency is looking for 12 men and 12 women volunteers. NASA needs more than brains for a manned Mars mission, University of Florida Professor Jeffrey Johnson said at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference on "Building a Winning Team for Missions to Mars." Buzz60 Farewell to a workhorse:: Mars rover Opportunity officially dead after 15 years The study will take place in a special, state-of-the-art facility known as the "envihab," which comes from the words environment and habitat. Applications for the study are available online from the German Aerospace Agency. The agency is looking for 12 men and 12 women volunteers. |
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 2, 2019 11:39:47 GMT
"Slobs of the world, here's a job for you. " 
Good morning KAT and all of our UFOCasebookers,
Peter Maxwell Slattery
Published on Apr 2, 2019
UFO over Glenrowan Australia April 2nd 2019 filmed by Peter Maxwell Slattery
~
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 2, 2019 11:48:23 GMT
Phys.org
Shrinking a medical lab to fit on a fingertip
by Bennett Mcintosh, Princeton University
2 April 2019
Identifying a patient's viral infection or diagnosing a blood disorder usually requires a lab and skilled technicians. But researchers at Princeton University have developed a new technology that goes a long way toward replacing the lab with a single microchip.
In an important step toward performing medical diagnoses using handheld devices, the researchers have adapted silicon chip technology similar to that found in personal computers and mobile phones to function as a biosensor. The technology uses tiny metal layers embedded in a microchip to eliminate all complex and bulky optical instrumentation employed in the diagnostic labs. As a result, the new system is almost as small as a grain of salt, and far less costly to manufacture than current diagnostic systems.
"The key idea is to allow complex optical systems in modern-day chips," said Kaushik Sengupta, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and one of the project's leaders. "All smartphones carry a million-pixel camera. How do we turn this into a device that allows laboratory-quality diagnostics?"
A commercial fluorescence-based biosensor typically carries an array of classical optical components including multiple filter sets, lenses and gratings. The more sensitive the system is, the more expensive and bulky the setup.
"We show these complex optical biosensor systems can also be realized in the same technology with absolutely no change in manufacturing the microchip," Sengupta said.
The researchers found that tiny metal layers already built into modern microchips can relatively easily be adapted to take advantage of light's unusual behavior when interacting with structures smaller than a single wavelength of light. Harnessing the light in this way allows for detection of thousands of biological substances from bacterial DNA to hormones. And because modern microchips already are designed to be extremely small, these structures can be made using standard manufacturing techniques, Sengupta said.
Although more work is required, the researchers hope the technology will lead to diagnostic systems contained in a pill or deployed on a smartphone.
"We show for the first time that this level of optical field manipulation is possible in a silicon chip. By eliminating all classical optics, the system is now small enough that you could start thinking about putting it in a pill," Sengupta said. "You could start thinking about diagnostics inside the body in a way you could not think about before."
In two papers, the first published Sept. 12, 2018, in the journal ACS Photonics and the second on Nov. 1, 2018, in Biomedical Optics Express, the researchers reported they have developed a sensor that can detect molecules such as DNA and proteins in samples as small as one microliter with sensitivities comparable to commercial instrumentation in diagnostic lab. (There are about 50 microliters in a drop of water.)
The new sensor chip, like a classic lab setup, detects targeted molecules by using chemical antibodies that are designed to react in the presence of a specific molecule. The antibodies are modified to generate light at a specific wavelength (fluoresce) when they are exposed to the target.
In a standard lab, the antibodies are placed in small wells on a testing plate about the size of a playing card. To make the assembly small enough to fit onto chip measuring 4 mm per side, Sengupta and his group worked with the group led by Haw Yang, a chemistry professor, to develop new techniques to prepare and distribute the antibodies. Working as team between two labs at Princeton, the researchers were able to design a plate with 96 antibody sensors that is small enough to fit on the chip.
As in a standard lab, the small plate is exposed to a testing sample, typically a liquid. Antibodies that come into contact with their specific target molecule will glow a faint red when exposed to ultraviolet light. Unfortunately, the red glow is incredibly dim compared to the ultraviolet light used to trigger it. That presented one of the most significant obstacles for the researchers.
"The ratio of light is the killer," Sengupta said. "We are shining between 10 million and 100 million photons at the target for every one photon that we get back."
Much of the space taken up in a standard tabletop detector is made up of optics and lenses used to filter this tiny red glow in order to distinguish it from the wash of triggering light. The new technology allows the researchers to do away with this system by using tiny metal layers embedded in the microchip to process the light.
"When you combine these massively scalable optics with a billion transistors in a same chip, a whole new set of possibilities opens up. To make things so small, we had to do them in a fundamentally different way," Sengupta said.
Because the tiny structures are built in the silicon chip, the researchers said the system can be mass produced and does not require detailed assembly in a lab. Sengupta said the ability to quickly and cheaply manufacture the device will be critical to the eventual production of new sensing equipment.
"Once we make the diagnostics cheaper," says Sengupta, "we can enable diagnostics in the developing world. And it's not just diagnostics. What we have come up with here is just a low- cost, tiny fluorescent sensor, and you can use fluorescent sensing in many different things: for food- and water-quality monitoring, environmental monitoring, and industrial applications."
phys.org/news/2019-04-medical-lab-fingertip.html
Crystal
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Post by swamprat on Apr 2, 2019 18:01:49 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Apr 3, 2019 0:55:15 GMT
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 3, 2019 11:40:54 GMT
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 3, 2019 11:46:37 GMT
International Business Times
Godlike Aliens On A Mission Visited Earth In Recent UFO Sighting?
By Precious Silva
04/03/19 AT 1:12 AM
A UFO sighting over the State of Trujillo, Venezuela could have been a visit from “godlike” aliens.
Friman Rodriguez and his cousin reportedly saw a UFO one hot day on Feb. 16. The used the former's phone to capture images of the sighting. Additionally, Rodriguez also told reporter Hector Escalante that he suffered a "painful headache" after seeing the object.
According to him, the UFO appeared to be a bright orange light “zig-zagging” across the sky that afternoon. The blog Inexplicata - The Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy said that there was a power blackout around the same time as the UFO’s arrival.
Alien enthusiast Scott Waring analyzed the photo taken by Rodriguez, and he suggested that such type of UFO has been observed in South America several times already. According to Waring, the UFO is a type of "godlike" alien species. Up close it seems like a bright orange light. Since it is too bright, many people could mistake it for the Sun during sunset.
Rodriguez noted that he didn't think much of it at first since it seemed like the Sun's reflection. However, he realized that the Sun was farther below and was to the left. He claimed that he felt fortunate to have seen the rare sighting.
Some speculations about the visit of the supposed "godlike" aliens include preventing humanity's horrible future, abducting them and teaching them about the possible ending in the future. Inexplicata further said that this type of UFO sighting in the country is mostly observed in areas rich in water and vegetation.
As for the continued search for life, astronomers may have found a way to check for more alien planets. Recently, a team of astronomers and engineers led by the University of Texas at Austin and Google developed an algorithm that can sift through the data of the Kepler space telescope.
This helped them discover two alien planets: K2-293b and K2-294b. Anne Dattilo, an undergraduate physics student at the University of Texas at Austin said that the same method may be used in NASA's TESS, which is the space agency's recently launched spacecraft that’s tasked to find more exoplanets.
www.ibtimes.com/godlike-aliens-mission-visited-earth-recent-ufo-sighting-2782525
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 4, 2019 11:37:45 GMT
Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers
Telegraph
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin 'planted a British flag on the moon'
Anita Singh, Arts and Entertainment Editor
3 April 2019
A British engineer has claimed that a Union Flag was planted on the moon by an unwitting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Keith Wright was an engineer at the Kennedy Space Centre, working on experiments for the 1969 Apollo mission.
Fifty years on, he has disclosed that he secretly ensured a little piece of Britishness made it to the moon, because he “wanted to give Brits a bit of credit”.
Speaking to The One Show on BBC One, Mr Wright said: “We were working on the experiments that the astronauts were going to put on the lunar surface. We had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin come to our facility for a run-through.
“There were two brackets on the experiment which held the solar panels folded while travelling to the moon. We got a ball pen and signed our names.. I signed my name and I thought, well, I’ll put ‘UK’. Then I thought, I’ll draw a little Union Flag.
“So we had a little Union Flag sketched onto there, installed it on the experiment package and it went to the moon.”
Mr Wright said the US flag was planted first, before the astronauts laid down the solar panels.
The Nottingham-born engineer worked in the UK for de Havilland before winning a coveted job on the Apollo space missions and moving with his young family to the US.
Of his meeting with Armstrong and Aldrin on the eve of the mission, he said: “Neil was very relaxed and quite jokey. We were concentrating so hard on doing our job, and seeing that they could do the job properly, it almost seemed normal. But, thinking about it afterwards, I did get their signatures.”
The planting of the US flag was back in the headlines last year when it was omitted from the Ryan Gosling film, First Man. Although the flag was seen at a distance as the men returned to Earth, there were no scenes of it being planted.
The omission led to a major row, with Republican senator Marco Rubio branding it “total lunacy” and Aldrin tweeting a picture of himself on the moon alongside the words “proud to be an American”.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/03/neil-armstrong-buzz-aldrin-planted-british-flag-moon/
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 4, 2019 11:42:12 GMT
Houston Chronicle
Creepy, scary UFO sightings reported in Texas in 2019
By Ismael Perez
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
In the minutes leading up to 2019, someone witnessed fiery orange lights flying soundlessly at a low altitude over San Antonio.
And that was just the beginning of numerous reports of unidentified flying objects spotted in Texas skies this year.
Three months into the year, there have been at least 24 reported unidentified flying objects reported throughout the state, according to the National UFO Reporting Center.
Click through to see some of the creepiest reported UFO sightings in Texas in 2019: www.chron.com/entertainment/article/Creepy-scary-UFO-sightings-reported-in-Texas-in-13736927.php?ipid=houstonhomepage#photo-16835374
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 4, 2019 13:27:23 GMT
LA Times
A homeless man wandered in one day, and this Arizona town adopted him
By John M. Glionna
Apr 04, 2019 | 4:00 AM
KINGMAN, ARIZ.
For years, the white-bearded man in the red Santa Claus outfit has been a familiar sight around this isolated high-desert town, his habits so routine people take notice when he’s not there.
In triple-digit August heat and on frosty January mornings, he pushes an overloaded cart along congested Stockton Hill Road, his companion toy rabbit riding shotgun, trundling unsteadily between his haunts at supermarkets, fast-food joints and coffeehouses.
Who is this character, this man in scarlet, people once asked. Is he homeless? Does he have substance or emotional issues? He seemed harmless, because not once did anyone see him stick out his hand to beg, bother or steal.
Eventually, some stopped to introduce themselves. James Zyla, as he calls himself, greeted them in a charming British accent uncommon to rural Arizona. His last name, he said, rhymed with sarsaparilla, a lovely word he’d once used in a poem and decided to imitate. For starters, he’d say, he didn’t like the terms “homeless” or “living on the streets,” and much preferred “on the road.”
And no, he didn’t need a handout. He was just a musician who wanted to play the electronic keyboard that never leaves his side.
Slowly, in this town of 25,000 mostly retirees and blue-collar workers, where untethered wanderers roll off Interstate 40 like so many tumbleweeds, residents let down their guard for one peculiar 68-year-old man few call James or Zyla. Here, he’s Santa James.
In an era when American cities struggle with their homeless populations, Santa James is celebrated, embraced like a long-lost friend.
People offer him gift certificates to Starbucks and McDonald’s, hand him a cup of coffee or bottle of water, buy him new Santa-themed clothing, including a stylish red hat with sparkly sequins. After residents learned he’s legally blind, they keep watch when he negotiates four-lane roads by sound and memory, the vehicles whizzing past merely a blur.
Now, when someone spots him considering an ill-advised crossing, they shout: “No James! Not yet!”
His Facebook page, which he updates on his iPad and fills with recollections and fiction, has more than 4,000 followers, many from Kingman, who cheerfully call out when they spot him around town.
“Who’s there?” he’ll ask, raising his bushy eyebrows. “Do I know you?”
“It’s me, Santa James,” they’ll say. And once they give their names, he always places them. His mind will wander a bit as he recites poems or recounts — for long stretches, non sequiturs galore — stories from the road. But tell him your name once, and he will remember you.
There’s something about Santa James — in his wandering stories, his Facebook posts, his demeanor — that touches people here, leaving them to marvel at his boyish wonderment of life. Cathi Bent, a friend, recalled sitting with the musician one night along the Colorado River in Laughlin, Nev.
“He said we were the two luckiest people on Earth,” she recalled, saying she knew Santa James’ eyesight was too poor to see the water. “Still, he described the beauty of the river in the most poetic terms. James sees with the eyes he used to have.”
Pat Barry and his wife, Judy, both 76, moved to this city six years ago after selling their two gas stations in the San Fernando Valley. The combination of Kingman’s neighborly vibe and Santa James’ exuberance makes the relationship work, they say.
“There’s something about James,” Pat said. “It’s his intelligence and his stories. There’s no negativity. He never asks for anything, but he always gives you something.”
When Pat gives him lifts around town, his cart jammed into the back seat, Santa James often recites lines of verse, one bit bemoaning his luck with women:
I was looking for a woman of means and ended up with a mean woman
The woman of my dreams ended up being Freddy Krueger’s sister, Lorena
Another lady offered to do my laundry, and took me to the cleaners.
The rhymes aren’t always lighthearted. After the mass shooting outside the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, Santa James recited a riff that began:
Just another day at the Mandalay Bay
Fifty-eight were blown away
Some came to play
One came to prey
Just another day at the Mandalay Bay.
Soon after they met, Pat learned Santa James walked the streets at night, so he parked a van in a Safeway parking on the homeless man’s route so he’d have a place to sleep. At first, Pat retrieved the vehicle each morning. Eventually, he left it there for more than a year, and gave Santa James the keys. He also took him to a truck stop for an occasional shower while Judy dutifully washed his clothes.
The couple also participate in a carpool that drives Santa James 30 miles to Laughlin, where twice a week he plays the grand piano in a casino bar for tips.
Now, Santa James is a regular dinner guest.
“Here James,” Judy said lovingly as she placed a plate in front of him. “Do you want some more bread?” And then, “Pat, put some more quiche on his plate.”
“Thank you both very much,” Santa James replied with his proper British manners.
In time, Kingman’s favorite wayfarer exposed more of his colorful past. Decades ago, he said, he played in a band called West One that performed in the same concert with Thin Lizzy in Newcastle, England. Another band he played with, Society’s Child, once opened for the Troggs at the famous Marquee Club in London.
He can play anything on his keyboard, he says, from rock and blues to country and Broadway tunes, and writes songs he says are influenced by music he heard on the radio growing up in England.
By the 1980s, Santa James was selling real estate in Orange County and working in a store that sold computers and pianos. Then one day he spotted an ad at Blockbuster video for a Hollywood extra. For years afterward, using his real name, James Godfrey, he got work in film and TV. The Screen Actors Guild confirmed his membership.
Today, he shares details of his acting days in self-effacing riffs that continue almost nonstop, aided by a near-photographic memory. “On the set of ‘ER,’ George Clooney used to call me by name,” he’ll say. “He’d say, ‘Hey, ya got the time, man?’”
Eventually, he walked away from Hollywood and, as he put it, ventured into the unknown world in search of the old musicians with whom he’d lost contact.
For a while, he lived out of his car, taking odd jobs. In 2009, however, he began to lose his eyesight — an event perhaps connected to a fall off a stage in Bullhead City, Ariz. — that left him unable to drive.
Before he landed in Kingman in 2014, a motorist in Bullhead City saw him walking along the road and handed him a Santa Claus outfit. He decided to adopt the look.
Santa James avoids checking accounts, rent payments and what he calls the hassle of collecting Social Security checks. He hasn’t had a drink since 2008. He insists he goes days without sleeping, and claims that he once played piano for 100 hours straight in a radio stunt.
In his travels, he’s run into the generous and the unkind. One summer day, a motorist yelled, “Hey fool, Christmas is in December!” At the next traffic light, a boy called from a bus window, asking if he could have a trumpet for Christmas.
Among his defenders and fans are the Kingman police. Officers stop to check on him, or ask him to recite a poem.
“This town really has adopted James as its community grandfather,” Police Chief Robert DeVries said. “Dispatchers will get a call about a man in a red suit lying down, and they’ll rush over to see if he’s OK. Whenever we hear of a vehicle-pedestrian mishap, somebody always says, ‘Hopefully, it’s not Santa James.’”
The warm reception given to Santa James shows a gentler side of a town criticized last year when Kingman was shown in Sacha Baron Cohen’s social satire program “Who Is America?” Residents say the community’s spirit was misrepresented when a handful of people expressed anti-Muslim sentiment at a public meeting.
“There exists in Kingman a spirit of generosity,” Santa James said. “You can feel it. And it’s not just the young or the old. It permeates the generations.”
Sometimes, Kingman comes together to help out Santa James.
Resident Mike Miller organized a crowdfunding effort in 2018 that raised $3,000 to buy Santa James a new keyboard. “We are not asking you to take care of James,” Miller wrote on social media. “We are asking you to help us, help him back to his feet. James could use a bunch of friends; that is way better than money.”
Last fall, high school senior Kaylene Purcell was researching an English project when she thought of Santa James. Her class was reading the play “The Crucible,” which explores the Salem witch trials, and students were seeking examples of people who live on society’s fringes.
“And I thought, ‘What about James?’ He’s different, but we love him,” Purcell said.
She invited Santa James to her school to ask him about being a perceived outcast. At first, in a taped half-hour interview with her two project partners, Purcell tried to ask a few straightforward questions. He replied with a series of madcap stream-of-conscience and unconnected tales, a typical Santa James gabfest that often made Purcell’s eyes widen.
She simply could not get a straight answer.
“What brought you to Kingman?” she asked at one point.
“Some people say there’s a woman to blame,” he answered, quoting a Jimmy Buffet song before launching into another long-winded diatribe that ended, “you don’t always know where the ripples go.”
But afterward, before the class, he connected with the students in his own Santa James way. He played the Beatles’ “Let It Be” on his keyboard, along with an original instrumental inspired by a hard-living friend named Daphne, a bartender who died breaking up a knife fight.
“People looked at one another,” recalled teacher Vickie McLean. “Cellphone cameras came out. I’ve never seen students so riveted.”
That night, Purcell approached manager Larry Backer at the Canyon 66 Restaurant, where she works as a waitress. Would he hire Santa James to perform there?
Backer agreed. In exchange for playing once a week, the musician was given a room at an adjoining hotel. He still likes to wander the streets with his cart, but now he has a regular place to stay.
Even so, Santa James doesn’t know how long he’ll remain in Kingman. When you’re on the road, he says, every gig is a one-night stand.
Recently, at a gathering Pat Barry organized for residents to meet a reporter with Santa James, retired aerospace worker Becky Brooks told of how she met him. She had read one of his short stories on Facebook about a girl who loses $1 billion at the racetrack on a horse named Birthday Cake. Anyone who liked the story, the post ended, should stop Santa James on the street and say the horse’s name.
Later, Brooks spotted him and called out from her car, “Birthday Cake!”
“You read that story?” said the man in red, obviously pleased.
Brooks knew she’d made a friend.
“Something about James touched a part of my soul that probably nobody else will touch,” she said, fighting tears. “I wanted to do something special to make his life a little easier.”
She drove him to Home Depot where they found a baby stroller on sale, one with lightweight rubber wheels for parents who like to jog with their infants. She used PVC piping to fashion a custom-made cart that includes a large bin for his belongings, along with side pockets and handlebars.
She described Santa James’ reaction. “I got the longest hug anyone has ever given me — he wouldn’t let go. It was a soft, warm, gentle hug. I had just moved to town and didn’t know many people. James didn’t know it then, but I needed that hug.”
As the gathering broke up, Brooks embraced the near-blind man in the sequined Santa’s cap. It was another long, warm, gentle hug.
www.latimes.com/la-na-col1-arizona-homeless-20190404-htmlstory.html
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 5, 2019 12:06:11 GMT
Good morning lovely people,
Earth Sky
Astronomers find a planet fragment orbiting a dead star
By Deborah Byrd
April 4, 2019
Astronomers from University of Warwick in Coventry, England, said on April 4, 2019, that they’ve detected
a relatively large fragment from a former planet, orbiting in a disk of debris encircling a dead star. The star is a white dwarf, and it’s located 410 light-years away. The white dwarf should have destroyed its solar system in a system-wide cataclysm that followed its death. But the newly discovered planet fragment is thought to be rich in heavy metals – iron and nickel – which helped it survive destruction. The astronomers said the fragment is orbiting the white dwarf:
… closer than we would expect to find anything still alive.
They also said the planet fragment has a “comet-like tail” of gas, creating a ring within the debris disk. And they said this system offers us a hint as to the future of our own solar system, 6 billion years from now. The discovery was reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science on April 4. These astronomers’ statement explained:
The iron and nickel rich planetesimal survived a system-wide cataclysm that followed the death of its host star, SDSS J122859.93+104032.9. Believed to have once been part of a larger planet, its survival is all the more astonishing as it orbits closer to its star than previously thought possible, going around it once every two hours.
This is the second time astronomers have found a solid planetesimal in a tight orbit around a white dwarf. It’s the first time that scientists have used spectroscopy for this sort of discovery. These astronomers used the Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma in Spain’s Canary Island. They examined:
… the debris disk orbiting the white dwarf, formed by the disruption of rocky bodies composed of elements such as iron, magnesium, silicon, and oxygen – the four key building blocks of the Earth and most rocky bodies. Within that disk they discovered a ring of gas streaming from a solid body, like a comet’s tail. This gas could either be generated by the body itself or by evaporating dust as it collides with small debris within the disk.
The astronomers estimate that this body has to be at least a kilometer (.6 miles) in size, but could be as large as a few hundred kilometers in diameter, comparable to the largest asteroids known in our solar system.
more after the jump:
earthsky.org/space/heavy-metal-planet-fragment-orbiting-white-dwarf
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 5, 2019 12:52:33 GMT
For Purr
Scientific American
Cats Recognize Their Own Names—Even If They Choose to Ignore Them
Domestic felines distinguish between their monikers and similar-sounding words, new research shows
By Jim Daley on April 4, 2019
Cats are notorious for their indifference to humans: Almost any owner will testify to how readily these animals ignore us when we call them. But according to a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports, domestic cats do recognize their own names—even if they walk away when they hear them.
Atsuko Saito, a behavioral scientist at the University of Tokyo, previously showed that cats can recognize their owners’ voices. In her latest study she narrowed this down, investigating whether they respond to hearing their names. The study included 78 cats from Japanese households and a “cat café.” (Such cafés, where patrons can interact with felines, are popular in Tokyo and have started to catch on in London and New York.)
During their experiments Saito and her colleagues used what behavioral psychologists call the habituation-dishabituation method. This involves repeatedly exposing a subject to a stimulus (in this case a spoken word) until the subject no longer displays any reaction. Then the subject is presented with a test stimulus (in this case, its name), and researchers observe whether it reacts. This step helps rule out responses to random stimuli.
For the new study, the scientists first had cat owners repeatedly say four words that were similar to their cats’ names, until the cats habituated to those words. Next the owners said the actual names, and the researchers looked at whether individual cats (when living among other cats) appeared able to distinguish their monikers. The cats had more pronounced responses to their own names—moving their ears, heads or tails, or meowing—than to similar words or other cats’ names.
Then the researchers had people unfamiliar to the cats speak the names, to test whether the cats still recognized them. Although their responses were less prominent than when their owners called them, they still appeared to recognize their names after being habituated to other words.
“This new study clearly shows that many cats react to their own names when spoken by their owners,” says biologist John Bradshaw, who studies human-animal interactions at the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute and was not involved in the new study. But Bradshaw says he is less convinced cats can recognize their names when spoken by someone unfamiliar. “I think that it’s entirely possible that some cats are able to generalize between one human voice and another, but I’d like to see more trials before I’d say that the evidence is compelling,” he says.
Saito says she thinks feline pets learn to recognize their names because of what is in it for them. “I think cats associated their names with some rewards or punishments,” she says—adding that she thinks it is unlikely the cats understand their names are attached to them. “There is no evidence that cats have the ability to recognize themselves, like us,” she explains. “So, the recognition about their name is different from ours.” Still, she says, it may be possible to teach cats to recognize other words. Whether that could allow humans to train cats to respond to commands—as dogs readily do—is another matter.
“Cats are just as good as dogs at learning,” Bradshaw says. “They’re just not as keen to show their owners what they’ve learned.” Most cat owners would probably agree.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-recognize-their-own-names-even-if-they-choose-to-ignore-them/
Crystal
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Post by swamprat on Apr 5, 2019 22:18:30 GMT
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 6, 2019 11:06:38 GMT
"Sigh.... Now it's not until Tuesday night! I won't be able to stay for launch!"
Sorry you are going to miss the launch Swamprat.
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Apr 6, 2019 11:09:26 GMT
Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers,
Crystal
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