Tag: ANIMALS

Here are a couple factoids for you to munch on this Friday. Last February, the world's most expensive camel sold for £1.6 million, or about $2.5 million. This camel was an international racing camel, and, yes, that exists. If the fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled world of camel racing doesn't excite you, the absurd wealth of the socialite Arab participants (or at least the brightly colored nose ...

Auburn University's Canine Detection Research Institute (CDRI) endeavors "to develop and innovate unique and novel applications for detection dogs." Well, the renowned Institute's new high-tech harness certainly seems to adhere to that innovative standard. The CDRI, whose furry bomb-sniffers and drug-detectors have been drafted by government and military organizations, reportedly equipped the ...

Rimma Golovko was trying to get a pic of a crocodile named Gena at an aquarium in the Ukraine when she suddenly lost her grip on her cell phone. Naturally, the poor croc swallowed it. Workers were originally skeptical of the woman's story until the phone started ringing -- inside Gena. Unfortunately, the animal now isn't feeling well, refusing food and acting "listless." Vets are hopeful Gena ...

When Freddy Johansen posted photos from a whale watching cruise on his Flickr account, he probably imagined that only a handful of close friends or family would find them interesting. As it turns out, though, the Norwegian's seemingly nonchalant photo of a humpback whale inadvertently resulted in a record-breaking biological discovery. As the Boston Globe reports, scientists first spotted ...

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a strange cyborg rat that they hope will help them develop a brain-machine interface (BMI) for controlling motorized wheelchairs. The so-called RatCar is a motorized vehicle that suspends a rat below it and is hooked up via electrodes inserted in the rodent's motor cortex. The rats were then trained to move the cart simply by thinking about ...

This year's IgNobel Prize winners, as always, came up with ingenious ways to do really zany things. This year's winner in the physics category, for example, discovered that people who wear socks on the outsides of their shoes are less likely to fall while walking on ice. Another researcher earned the vaunted prize for his straight-to-DVD research on fruit bat fellatio. Perhaps the weirdest ...

For the art.tech group exhibition currently on view at The Lab in San Francisco, artist David Bowen contributed a dynamic work called 'Fly Blimps' -- a trio of small, helium-filled dirigibles controlled by those pesky members of the order diptera. Sensors are embedded inside the flies' small chambers, each of which contains food, water and light. As the swarm, which includes up to 50 houseflies, ...

A sign that you might be losing your mind: You've created a Facebook profile for your cat. Don't get us wrong. We don't mind a little anthropomorphism every now and then. Hell, who doesn't get a hearty chuckle out of slapping a bow tie on a dog, and playing the Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire? But creating a Facebook profile for your dog? And writing in his non-existent voice? A little weird. ...

There's no denying the hype around the iPad, but, apparently, humans aren't the only mammals who are intrigued by Apple's tablet. According to a press release (PDF) from Speak Dolphin, a bottlenose dolphin named Merlin recently learned to communicate using the iPad. Merlin, who resides at a research center in Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, is shown an object, like a ball or plastic duck. Then, trainer ...

When Mattel's 'Puppy Tweets' opened up Twitter to the entire canine community, cat owners everywhere were outraged over what they saw as overt discrimination -- and with good reason. Why, pray tell, should a dog's inner thoughts be valued higher than a cat's? Would the animal kingdom really sit on its hands and allow Twitter to refuse service to an entire population, simply because of the size ...

Taking inspiration from an elephant's trunk (or maybe Dr. Octopus), a German company has built a set of robotic arms that could make it safer for humans and machines to interact. According to Engadget, Festo's Bionic Handling Assistant (BHA) is equipped with gentle and agile pincers that can safely grab something from a human without ripping off an entire limb with it. For example, if the BHA ...

People will always argue about what should and shouldn't be protected under free speech, but most people who aren't named Michael Vick would agree that animal cruelty falls outside of its borders. Yesterday, however, the Supreme Court decided that current law governing the depiction of animal cruelty actually goes too far in prosecuting those who broadcast video or images of animal cruelty. In ...

Two brothers have discovered a way to get close-up photos of African wildlife without risking life or limb. According to Wired, Will and Matthew Burrard-Lucas rigged a Canon EOS 400D camera to a remote-control buggy, and cruised it around Tanzania. The boys have even chronicled the adventure, which saw its share of excitement, on their blog. Will and Matthew took a basic four-wheeled robotic ...

Laura Boffi, a design student in Copenhagen, and her team have created a special jacket that allows rescue dogs to relay messages from survivors while tagging their location. According to DVICE and the video after the jump, the jacket plays music while the dog searches for a victim in the wake of an earthquake or other disaster. An accelerometer detects when the dog sits, and then, the victim can ...

Share After a Greenpeace report accused Nestle of importing palm oil from suppliers who are destroying the Indonesian rainforests that are home to endangered orangutans, a bevy of angry consumers flocked to the candy maker's Facebook page. Apparently dissatisfied with Nestle's tepid public defense of its palm oil policy, environmentally conscious users flooded the page with vitriolic comments ...