| Obesity Gene |
How hard does a dog have to fight to eat sausage? Scientists at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom invited dozens of pet owners to take their Labrador retrievers to a veterinary school for a willpower test.
In the empty white room, a research assistant asked each Labrador to smell a hot dog before placing it in a plastic hamster cage and sealing it with black tape. Some dogs showed only a brief interest in the sausage in the cage, spending more time exploring the rest of the room. But there are also some dogs who are very obsessed with sausages, especially a black Labrador named "Aish", who is very excited, beats the cage constantly, and finally rips the tape with his teeth and eats the hot dog.
As it turns out, Axel not only has a strong will and teeth, but also a genetic variant linked to obesity. The reason why Ace is not overweight may be because of the strict eating plan the owner has made for him. But Eleanor Ravan, the scientist behind the study, believes that this hidden genetic variation is linked to food-induced mania.
Ravan's interest in the phenomenon began more than a decade ago, when she became a veterinarian and saw that some breeds of pets tended to gain weight more than others. Soon after a group of scientists published the complete canine genome, Lafan decided to study genetic variants associated with obesity. In 2013, after earning a PhD in genomics, Lafan founded the 'Genes for Obesity in Dogs' (GOdogs) project at the University of Cambridge.
In GOdogs' first research project, Lafan analyzed the genes of more than 300 Labrador retrievers. The Labrador is a breed with a fairly high risk of obesity. Lavan and her colleagues collected saliva samples from these Labs along with important data on their physique and behavior. It turned out that some dogs, like Axel, had an incomplete gene called "opioid-promelanocortinin" (POMC). POMC primarily performs metabolic functions in the hypothalamus—a peanut-sized organ deep in the brain. The hypothalamus affects appetite and calorie expenditure in an organism. Only a few hundred cells in this organ are affected by the POMC gene, but this small group of cells acts like a signal processing center that controls the metabolism of the entire organism.
Lavan's research shows that about 1 in 5 Labrador retrievers have mutations in the POMC gene, which is significantly associated with increased appetite and obesity. Lavan also studied a group of Labrador guide dogs and found that three-quarters of them had a mutation in the POMC gene, suggesting that the gene drives them to constantly seek out food rewards, making them easier to train.
About 6 percent of U.S. men and 10 percent of U.S. women are obese, and the diseases associated with it — such as diabetes and heart disease — can even be fatal. Lavan and other researchers believe that understanding why certain breeds of dogs are more likely to gain weight may reveal unsolved mysteries of human obesity and even help researchers develop related drugs.
| Intimate Contact |
In the third chapter of Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice ends up in a forest where "everything has no name" and she doesn't know what to call the surrounding trees and what to do A deer came. The deer is very close, and Alice hugs it and continues to move forward quietly. Walking to a clearing in the forest, all things regained their names, and the deer was suddenly frightened, broke away from Alice's arms and ran away, leaving Alice alone and lonely.
This fable about human consciousness and language is especially thought-provoking in a society where humans increasingly desire close encounters with animals to heal psychological and social wounds. This animal therapy is like the nameless forest in the story.
In the equestrian healing program of the Compton Junior Equestrian Team in Los Angeles, the youth from the slums receive equestrian training, familiarize themselves with the habits of horses, and learn to control them, so as to escape the bad influence of drugs and street gangs. The equestrian team's founder, Maisha Akbar, said these experiences put participants into the "intimacy" of horses. Horses can have a significant impact on humans. "Whether it's a physical illness or an emotional or psychological disorder, being with a horse can help regulate the mind and body, and there are so many equine programs out there because it does have tangible results," says Akbar
. Magical things can happen when competent animals get along. When we let go of the subjectivity and conceptual constraints of language, we can see the animals that exist deep within us. Studies have found that humans share similar psychophysiological mechanisms with other primates, as well as elephants, whales, parrots, bees and even flies. Although the species are different, the neuronal structures and neural routes are similar. Animal therapy gives us a subconscious awareness of cross-species connectedness. Touch in animal therapy causes the body to release endorphins (the so-called "happy hormones"), which counteract adrenaline and cortisol (the "sad hormones").
How much neuro-healing can animal therapy have? How long do these effects last? These questions are difficult to answer. But therapists believe that animal therapy works in part because higher cognitive functions in the human brain are temporarily shut down during treatment. A neuroimaging study on patients with severe depression after taking a specific drug also came to a similar conclusion: the drug not only does not amplify the higher consciousness, but instead shuts down the self-consciousness center of the brain, allowing people to enter the unfettered emotional world and experience Childlike pure curiosity.
Leslie Martin, a trauma therapist at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, once treated a Marine Corps veteran who was burly and grim-faced, never opening his mouth to talk about his inner struggles and hardships. One day he sat at Martin's desk as usual, silent as usual. Just then, Martin's dog, Casey, came over and rested his head on the veteran's arm.
"He lowered his head," Martin recalls. "Casey licked him lightly, and suddenly he started to howl. That bond between man and animal freed everything in him, and Casey was the catalyst."
| Domestic cat mystery |
The back room of the Manhattan Animal Endocrinology Clinic is home to six or seven cats. Each cat has its own "apartment" with a built-in plush bed, cat climbing frame and a box for hiding. Soft classical music blared from speakers, and cat-friendly images—birds chirping and squirrels jumping—played on the TV. These cat patients can also watch live streaming: a wild bird feeder hangs outside every window.
One afternoon in April, a black cat named "Nubi" hunched up warily and stared out the window at a pigeon that had landed on a feeder. Clinic director Mark Peterson opened the door to Nubby's apartment and greeted the 12-year-old male cat warmly. "How are you?" Peterson reached out and scratched his chin lightly as he spoke to Nubi. Nubi used to be irascible, and its owner once joked that he needed a priest to exorcise it, but today it is very docile and did not resist Peterson's hand, but continued to observe the pigeons outside the window. Peterson wanted to spend a little more time with Nubi's four neighbors - McGee, Bige, Fiji and Napoleon - but the situation didn't allow it because "these cats are radioactive."
This sentence is not a metaphor. Just the day before, the five cats had been treated with radioactive iodine. These five cats are just a few of the many cats with hyperthyroidism (hyperthyroidism), one of the most mysterious diseases in the veterinary world. When Peterson entered veterinary school in 1972, cat hyperthyroidism seemed nonexistent. Today, he specializes in the disease. Hyperthyroidism has been a common disease in cats for decades, but no one knows why. Peterson said that he has treated more than 10,000 cats with hyperthyroidism. "I have basically been researching this disease for the past few decades, but I still have more questions than answers."
Although the exact cause is unclear, scientists have found One of the most likely explanations: A series of studies have revealed a link between this bizarre feline disease and a common flame retardant in the home. The findings, however, answer one question and raise another: If household chemicals disrupt hormones in cats, how does it affect humans?
Environmental toxicants such as mercury, asbestos, pesticides and other compounds are equally likely to affect humans and animals. Humans have been taking advantage of this since coal miners used canaries to detect poison gas in mines a century ago. Sick animals are like sentinels, warning of threats to human health. Cats and dogs spend most of their time at home and don't miss anything on the floor, so they're the best sentinels to detect household chemicals.
Zoe Brogdon, 12: "With horses, I've met bad people, but I don't care because my horse is by my side."
Ennico Barber, 28: "We believe in each other. If I'm scared, it's scared, and it might stop; if I'm confident, it's confident, and it's going to jump with me."
Ashata Alison, 18 (right): "I've seen the children change. The boys who were rowdy at school came here and quieted down and were willing to talk to the horses. The girls too, they became more Lively."
10-year-old Asia Carter-Thomas: "If I don't ride, I feel like something is missing. It's the feeling of flying on horseback, like soaring in the sky, carefree and free, Leave reality behind. Of course, after dismounting, reality catches up and hits people in the head."
Nathan Williams-Bonner, 22: "Have you seen Avatar? When their hair touches something, it becomes one with it. When riding a horse, the horse pays full attention and carries out your every command, Like that feeling, it's a total connection, and the horse pays attention to your every reaction."
Peterson and one of his patients
Are hyperthyroid cats a contemporary canary? We know that flame retardants also accumulate in the human body. In one study, scientists detected a flame retardant called "polybrominated diphenyl ethers" in all participants. "The detection rate is almost 100 percent," says Duke University environmental chemist Heather Stapleton. The compound is present in human blood, milk and tissue, and can even stay in fat for years.
Peter Rabinowitz, director of the Center for Whole Health at the University of Washington, said: "I've always believed that we should pay attention to what animals are sending us. There are still many diseases in the animal kingdom that humans need to explore."
| God of Digestion |
Amit Chowdhury opened the vessel containing the snake's blood, and the first thing he noticed was its color, like yogurt. The plasma, from a freshly fed Burmese python, was full of fatty acids and was cloudy white. Something so greasy must be poisonous, Choudhury thought. Sure enough, when he applied the same amount of fatty acids to human pancreatic islet cells in a petri dish, the cells chose to self-destruct because they couldn't withstand the stress of decomposition. But he knows that even if the snake's plasma turns yogurt-like after each meal, it can live just fine.
It was the fall of 2012, and Chowdhury was doing postdoctoral research at Harvard University and became interested in the peculiar physiology of Burmese pythons. The snake is almost a crawling digestive tract: in the wild it usually lies in a quiet ambush for a month or two, and when the time is right, it curls up, hangs a monkey, a pig or an antelope, then swallows its prey in one bite s head. An adult python can consume up to 50,000 calories at a time, and this torrent of nutrients and fatty acids can be fatal to other species, but pythons have adapted to this way of eating. In the week after eating, the python's body becomes a "digestive engine": the intestines thicken, the liver and kidneys nearly double in size, insulin levels skyrocket, body temperature rises by 14 degrees Celsius, heartbeat triples, and metabolism soars. After digesting all the food, the boa constrictor's organs returned to their original size.
Chaudhry wondered if the boa constrictor's yogurt-like plasma contained some sort of digestion-promoting substance. He put a few drops of python blood on the pancreatic cells of mice and watched how the cells responded. "The results were amazing," he recalls. Pancreatic cells in mice exposed to python blood started producing large amounts of insulin -- the fatty acid-laden python plasma activated pancreatic cells.
Choudhury grew up in a rural area near Kolkata, India, and grew up afraid of snakes. "The adults told us not to mess with these animals," he said. But now, he realizes, snakes may be hiding a cure for diabetes. The pancreatic cells he used in his experiments were beta cells, and diabetes is a beta cell disease. With type 1 diabetes, the body's immune system almost destroys these cells, and because the body lacks insulin, the patient's blood sugar levels spike; type 2 diabetes is usually caused by a Western-style diet and obesity, and patients are insensitive to the insulin produced in the body, so beta cells Compensatory synthesis and secretion of large amounts of insulin, eventually debilitating or death due to overload. So, could Chowdhury find a beta cell-strengthening substance in python blood?
To confirm the experimental results, Chowdhury repeated the above experiment with the blood of another snake, and the beta cells went into a frantic working state again. Four other experiments that followed all confirmed the previous results.
| God Turtle Lives |
Every morning, Fred takes a restless walk in my parents' yard in suburban Honolulu. Although the courtyard is only 55 square meters, it is green, cool and comfortable, with ferns, heliconias and fragrant flowers. Fred, 15 years old and weighing 36kg, has never left the compound since he was adopted by my parents two years ago. Pink and yellow petals from the big trees outside the fence always fall on him when he takes a nap in the shadow of the flowers. Fred's Sulcata tortoise was the result of my parents' impulsive purchase: They bought Fred from a guy near Waikiki for $250 without realizing how troublesome it would be to keep a tortoise.
Every morning, Fred needs alfalfa grass, romaine lettuce, and protein-rich kibble. While it was having breakfast, my parents cleaned its droppings and sprayed the grass around it. After about 5 hours, it was time for lunch again. At 6:00 pm, my parents are going to check if it has got into its cabin, where it will hit the walls and the ground, and this process will last at least 20 minutes - the Sulcata tortoise is native to sub-Saharan Africa and is naturally Drive them to dig tunnels in the desert to find water. At 8pm, it became sluggish. Like all reptiles, Fred was a cold-blooded creature who would stay in the cabin until morning, waiting for the sun to shine again.
Having a turtle at home often makes people sigh at the ancient world and the insignificance of human beings. Nature has created thousands of creatures. Over the millennia, human form has changed dramatically: our heads have gotten bigger, our teeth have gotten smaller, our legs have gotten longer, and our jaws have gotten weaker. But the turtles are still the original version, with almost no changes because they don't need it. Some species of turtles have been around for 300 million years, longer than dinosaurs. They embody the subtlety of nature and the imperfection of man. Turtles are older than humans in every way, they can live to be 150 years old and can weigh up to 90kg. I can't help feeling humbled in the presence of turtles: they're slow and clumsy, but they're constant. That's why turtles are special pets, a constant reminder of the fragility and shortness of our lives.
Compared with our ancestors, our labor volume is greatly reduced, but we have a stronger desire for love. The new task of pets is to answer these two questions of who loves me and how that love can be perfectly expressed, and to bring us some comfort in this loneliest of times.
So Fred made me rethink why humans keep pets. If pets' greatest gift is to make humans feel loved, their greatest gift is to make humans feel needed.
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