Word: dog
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Your favorite barista. Your acquaintance at the gym. Your fellow dog walker. Your co-worker. Perhaps these people are more important to your health and welfare than you realize. In her new book, Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don't Seem to Matter ... but Really Do (W.W. Norton), author Melinda Blau and Purdue psychology professor Karen Fingerman explore the meaning of these often overlooked ties. TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs reached Blau at her home in Northampton, Mass. (See TIME's list of the top 10 doctored photos...
Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, began exploring the verbal gifts of dogs when she saw a television show about a border collie named Rico--an animal that to all appearances could fetch dozens of different objects in response to their names. Kaminski put Rico to a rigorous test and confirmed that the dog could learn names for more than 200 toys, balls and other items. "I think Rico is a highly talented dog," says Kaminski, "but we've also found new dogs that do what Rico...
...foxes are a guide, dog evolution may have begun with a similar shift in personality. Ancestors of dogs could cooperate to hunt, but the cooperation had limits. Wolves are fiercely competitive, as each one tries to claw its way to the top of the pack. Hare proposes that aggressive wolves evolved to have an easygoing personality thanks to a new opportunity: trash...
Deeper understanding of the mind of the dog will come with more testing, and Hare and other researchers are planning it--on a grand scale. They're designing new experiments to compare different breeds and to search for genes that were transformed as the animals' social intelligence evolved. Plenty of dog owners are signing up for the studies Hare will be launching this fall. "We'd be happy with thousands," he says...
...quits on Karzai, the results could be disastrous. "It will be dog-eat-dog here," says Ashraf Ghani, a U.S.-educated presidential contender. In the vacuum created by a U.S. pullout, he argues, the Taliban would retake Kabul while millions of Afghans who embraced Western promises of girls' education, democracy and a place for Afghanistan in the 21st century would flee the country...