Daily Archives: February 6, 2017

How a Toronto doctor made medical and astronautical history – TVO

Posted: February 6, 2017 at 2:43 pm

On Jan. 11, while hurtling around Earth at gravity-defying speed, astronauts aboard the International Space Station did something that could revolutionize extraterrestrial health care: using a desktop-sized 3D printer, they made their own medical supplies, using blueprints downloaded direct from Toronto.

3D4MD, the company behind the historic feat, created the digital files, which can be printed out in three dimensions wherever needed. Its really not that different from a Microsoft Word file, says Julielynn Wong, founder of 3D4MD and its partner group, Medical Makers. And the library is similar to iTunes. The immediate benefits are clear: instead of taking up valuable room on spacecraft, astronauts can attend to medical emergencies by making custom supplies to order. The crowdsourced library of tools already includes finger splints and prosthetic hands and according to Wong, the best is yet to come.

Growing up in Ontario, Wong was always fascinated with space. As a child, she joined the Girl Guides and quickly accumulated achievement badges including an astronomy badge, which shes kept ever since. She joined the Royal Canadian Air Cadets at 13 and got her glider-pilots licence three years later. Today she owns at least six drones, and races them for fun. One of the great things about racing drones, she says, is breaking them. Because then you have to fix them. Once you understand how technology works, then you can build it, and then you can teach others how to as well.

Her foray into 3D printing is only a first step in the burgeoning field of galactic medical care. Raffi Kuyumjian, a flight surgeon with the Canadian Space Agency, explains that getting regular medical tools to the ISS is simple enough although saving any shelf room on board is useful. But what gets Kuyumjian excited is the possibility of future innovations. Getting equipment to low-orbit is one thing, he says, but that becomes much more difficult on a deep-space mission for example, to a Martian colony. He continues: if we could get to a point where we could print medicine in space, so it would have a longer shelf-life, that could be critical. Right now, thats just science fiction.

Tell that to Wong. I have had discussions about that, she says, adding that last March the U.S Food and Drug Administration approved a 3D-printed pill. Printing pills in the solar system, she believes, is doable. It would have many benefits: you could customize doses and would only have to print what you need, she says. These solutions will outlive us. A future colonist could download that file and bring it to Mars. Its a form of immortality, if you think about it.

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Wong calls her 3D printers Star Trek replicators, and her dream is to turn science fiction into reality. Still, she says, the really exciting possibilities are here on Earth.

One in seven Canadians lives with a disability, she says, statistics memorized. Nearly a billionpeople live on less than $2 a day, and 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity. These people are her target market. She envisions a future where any Canadian can go to a public library and print out a finger splint for $2 and meanwhile, in developing countries, medical supplies can be printed and drone-delivered to those in need. My dad is a physician, and he makes house calls, with his bag, she says. I like to think the 3D printer is the doctors bag of the future.

There are hurdles to clear: among other things, approval from regulatory boards (she still needs the FDA to clear her finger splints for terrestrial use) and, of course, cost. To date, 3D4MD is funded by ancillary income fees from keynote speeches, exhibitions, and corporate workshops. Wong is trying to tap new revenue sources, including corporate donors and a newmodel for the file library (wherethe basics are cheapbut customization costs extra).

At the very least, Wong already has a place in the medical and celestial history books. Were building a legacy to benefit humanity, says. Which is kind of nice.

Nathaniel Basen is a Toronto-based freelance journalist.

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The Fairly Traded Coffee Party – Patheos (blog)

Posted: at 2:43 pm

An over-caffeinated hysteria is the backdrop against which the Presidency of Donald Trump has begun.

At first, the hysteriaseemed the inevitable aftermath of a particularly nasty and at times vitriolicpolitical campaign. With two such dislikable and polarizing candidates, a winter of discontent was comingno matter who became the 45th President of the United States.

But the range and intensityof the outrageseems to be growing every morning, and in a manner asymmetric with past elections.

The asymmetry invites further reflection.

It seems to me that the range is boundless because Hillary Clintons loss wasnt just a political defeat. It was a radical contradiction of the progressives worldview convictions.

The postnationalist corporations a designation which includes celebrities, the media, multinational corporations, and various international agencies are predicated upon a globalism built on technology that seeks to remove all boundaries, particularly of a moral nature; on the other hand, President Trump has clearly defined boundaries to his vision for America, and upholds the historic position that as President, his prime responsibility should be to his country: America first.

President Trumps stances are problematic for politicians and institutions around the globe that have been thinning borders of all sorts for a generation. As the lead actor on the international stage, the multinationalists recognize that the United States lead will force the political class of other countries to change. A Brexit-like effect will require them to demonstrate a similar patriotism and priority of care for their own citizens, not just the good of the wealthy multinationals that live in every country.

Trickle down multinational economics and open tap immigration policies arent working for Middle America, or the first world for that matter.

Instead of a localized earthquake that shakes American politics like the Tea Party, the reaction to Trump is a global tsunami of the expressive individualism that forms the civil religion of the global elite. And because it is an establishment rebellion, it comes not from the mouths of the ordinary people of middle America, but those of the good and the great, or in the debauched equivalents of our day, the celebrities and the CEOs of multinational corporations.

It is symbolic that Starbuckshas capitalized on the feeling to advertise its internationalist and borderless bona fides, because it is serving up the antithesis of the Tea Party movement.

We might call it a neo-Marxist Fairly Traded Coffee Party.

The defeat of the technocratic, postnationalist establishment

It seems irrelevant to them that some of President Trumps policies sound a lot like those of Bernie Sanders, whose stances were wildly popular with many in the Democrat ranks. It is irrelevant because the Fairly Traded Coffee Party is not a popular revolt, it is an organized establishment pushback manipulating the causes of the various identity groups of its anti-establishment base to foment insurrection against their common enemy.

However much she was disliked, Hillary Clinton representedcontinuitywith the consensus that existed across political party lines. That movement didnt need a leader with policies. It simply needed a likable figurehead. It had that in Barack Obama, just as it has one now in Canada in the avatarthat is Justin Trudeau.

The consensus uponwhich these figureheads govern exist on amyriad of faith commitments ofthe technocratic elites. But taken as a whole, they relate to the hopefultranshumanist and posthumanist agenda tochange humanityfundamentally.

President Obama was a perfect leader for them. His hope and change were vague slogans. While the slogans resonated withthe needs of the rust belt andAmericas heartland, the same voters that Trump has just captured, it became clear that Obamaspolicies of hope and change were transnationalist policies more in tune with the agenda of the UN, Silicon Valley, the Ivy League, and the European technocratic elite than with jobs for middle America.

The change the coastal elites had in view, which President Obamadelivered on, was an intensification of the transformations of human nature that had been taking place in evolutionary biology and research institutes at least since C.S. Lewis identified them in 1943 inThe Abolition of Man. With respect to sexuality and the family, it had atranshumanistimpulse; with respect to the environment, it wasposthumanist.

To both the transhumanist and posthumanist movements, the deeply defined social relationships and implications of a Biblical norm for sex, marriage, family, church, school, business, community, and nation the very things that made America great were the obstaclesit was managing to eradicate at an extraordinary rate across the globe.

Trumps promise to restore, strengthen and defend the boundaries around these things by putting America firstis a strike at their abolition of man.

All the coffee in Starbucks wont wake his opponents from that living nightmare.

And the rage is served hot every morning, individualized to the customers antinomian taste.

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Filthy Assistance: Revisiting ‘Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life’ – ComicsAlliance

Posted: at 2:43 pm

Image Credits: Vertigo

In the 1990s,Warren EllisandDarick Robertson foresaw a future of twisted behavior, renegade politics, and uncontrollable technology inTransmetropolitan. Wererevisiting the series book by book, because in a time of unrest anduncertainty we could all usesome Filthy Assistance.

In book two, Lust For Life, the world is brought into sharper relief as the new and the old crash into each other repeatedly, leaving our characters dealing with the fallout. Spider Jerusalem also confronts assassins putting a hit on his life as part of a convoluted scheme tied up in a messy divorce in a storyline that may go a bit too far

In the second volume of Transmetropolitanthe world and our narrator and guide to it come into focus more clearly.

Three one-shot stories open the volume, which was written by Ellis, with pencils by Darick Robertson, inks by Rodney Ramos, colors by Nathan Eyring, and letters by Clem Robbins. In the first, Channons boyfriend is leaving her, joining a transhumanist movement where he is literally going to be uploaded to the cloud. (If Dropbox formed a human face and created flowers, I might be more forgiving of those times theres a data breach that leaks all its files to the world.)

Neural uploading nicknamed braintaping in the cyberpunk fiction I read growing up, back when magnetic tapes existed and the occasional dinosaur roamed the Earth is a long-speculated end goal for transhumanist perspectives on the human race, a cure for death itself. Heaven on Earth. Except that in Transmetropolitan, anyone selling you on Heaven is either lying to you or to themselves.

One of Channons boyfriends first acts as a foglet is to get intimate with another foglet, right in front of Channon, andthe story ends with Spider in the unique position of running out to comfort Channon. All this brings into sharp relief one of the running themes of Transmetropolitan: that better cars and better computers didnt make us better people, and the worst frailties of the human condition are frailties of compassion and the heart.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the second story, arguably the best story in all of Transmetropolitan, and certainly my favorite. Spooling out of a single panel of shell-shocked street people in the first issue, this story takes the promise of the post-death future and reaches back into the past, to tempt us with it; you too, can be immortal, since in the future death will have been conquered.

But none of us float alone in a void; all of us are shaped by the forces around us. (This life extension service is specifically only available in first-world countries; like William Gibson said, the future is here, but unevenly distributed, and the fly in the ointment of transhumanism is that one-third of the world still lacks electricity.) We have family; we have friends; we have a society we understand, jobs we know how to do, favorite hobbies, favorite keepsakes, wedding bands and knickknacks, and our favorite coffee mugs.

For Mary, the subject of the story that Spider tells the reader, all of this is stripped away as she is reborn in a future that doesnt preserve any of that (or it does see the next story but again, the future is distributed unevenly). She is even stripped of most of her voice there is only the bare snippet of a conversation with a faceless man, the rest conveyed via Spiders writing, which forces us to look at her at a remove, and to empathize with her anyways.

She is shoved out into the world without all of the context that makes her her, and she is lost without it, realizing just how small in the face of the towering forces of society we all are, buoyed along by an ocean we cant tame and a wind we cant predict. The future is a place where death has been beaten back, making life so cheap that any excuse not to care about it is one that societys taken.

The last of the three one-shot stories is about the future reaching back into the past via different means, sending people back to live out the ultimate in LARPing, fully stepping into a long-decayed culture. That no-one thinks to match up the Revivals of the previous story with one of the cultural preserves from this story, where they might live in comfort, is a testament to how much the City suffers from institutional failure; an obvious solution forgotten because, again, not enough people care.

One of the preserves is less a preserve of times long past and more a quarantine zone where legal regulations of technology are relaxed, and it sets up years in advance Spiders tragic ailment, a testament to the power that playing the long game can bear out, much as it did with Preacher. Robertson and Nathan Eyring are the stars of this one shot, illustrating a variety of cultural periods and a realm of future-tech beyond the neon-cyberpunk aesthetic of the City proper.

The final story in the book, clocking in at multiple chapters, is an extended shaggy dog story with a literal shaggy dog (okay, a sentient shorthaired pitbull who also is a cop, because comics are great). Spider is deprived of his legal protections and attacked in his home

and the artful cussing and choreography of, say, Preacher is a million miles away. The fight is bloody and horrifying, making Spider sick, and robbing him of his gift with words.

It also does some notable worldbuilding, based around Ellis and Robertsons conception of the future as monocultural in many ways, down to the French language being eradicated in the name of the cultural supremacy of English, showing us a world where colonialism marches on in search of new targets to eradicate. It also gives us naked newscasters, which became a reality one year later. (Okay, so that wasnt a difficult one to predict.)

It also features an extremely sketchy plot point, in the form of Indira Ataturk, the woman on the inside who helped orchestrate an assassination attempt on Spider as part of the longest, messiest divorce in history. In The Words medieval-style interrogation room, she confesses that due to at best criminal negligence and at worst deliberate action, going on assignment with Spider exposed her to the electronic equivalent of an aphrodisiac, and she was filmed having sex with an entire room.

While underage.

This feels like it crosses a line, since shes made out to be a villain of a sort, but her motivation is honestly 100% justifiable. Spider is meant to be a good journalist, but this is the action of a bad one; hes supposed to be a charming bastard, our bastard, but this just makes him into a bastard. It barely comes up again, other than a running gag about how Spider treats his assistants, and I have to ask if the creators decided this was best swept under the rug.

Of course, nothing stays buried under the rug forever, especially in politics, and in the next volumeSpider confronts the journalists natural enemy: politicians. Well see you all next time, two weeks into the future.

If you would like to support good journalism which never stops being necessary in any era these organizations can always use your help:

Next: Five Comics To Read To Prepare You For Trump's America

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Transhuman: A New Documentary on People Who Want to Live Forever – The Libertarian Republic

Posted: at 2:42 pm

By: Elias J. Atienza

The transhumanist community is getting a new look at by News2Share founder and editor Ford Fischer. In a new documentary, Fischer wants to tell the story about the transhumanist movement and increase the understanding of their goals.

The transhumanist movement is decentralized, though they have made some strides into centralizing their political activities. Zoltan Istvan ran under the Transhumanist Party in the 2016 presidential election, though it is unknown how many votes he received since he was a write-in candidate and did not appear in on any state ballots.

But the most interesting part is the intersectionality between transhumanism and libertarianism. The transhumanist community often agrees with the libertarian side of personal freedom and the Transhumanist Party presidential candidate supported Johnsons push to be involved in the debates.

Below is an interview with Fischer on transhumanism and his documentary. If you would like to support Fischers effort in making the documentary, or support News2Sharein general, go to this link. The trailer is at the end of the article.

Transhuman is expected to come out in December.

Has been lightly edited for clarity.

TLR: What is Transhuman all about?

Transhuman will tell the story of the transhumanist movement. Transhumanists have a diverse set of goals, but theyre best summed up by three goals: Super wellbeing, super longevity, and super intelligence. All three goals seek to evolve humanity by using technology. Super wellbeing means amplifying the body with tech. For example, Ive filmed people inject RFID microchips into their body that serve basic functional purposes like opening their car door or unlocking their computer. More broadly, many people concerned with super wellbeing hope to make themselves cyborgs (part human, part machine). Many attempt to use tech to give themselves new senses or abilities, such as an implant that detects earthquakes anywhere on the planet and vibrates whenever one occurs, thus giving someone a sense of the earths movements. Gene editing is also a vital part of this mission. Super longevity is the goal of using tech to elongate life. They tend to see aging as a disease and something that should be cured. Through medicine or the replacement of vital organs with indefinitely functioning technologies, they hope to expand lifespan, possibly to the point where death becomes optional. Super intelligence is a bit more abstract, but deals with using technology to expand the capabilities of the mind and bridge between computers and the brain. In the extreme, the notion of singularity is something this trend explores. The film will attempt to uncover the largely underground movement of people beginning to perform experiments in this space, and discuss the political, philosophical, and socioeconomic implications of a transhumanist future.

TLR: What is libertarian about Transhuman?

As one would expect, transhumanists are often written off as bizarre. There are varying degrees, but most people would be skeptical or creeped out by the notion of people volunteering to put LED lights or RFID chips under their skin, for example. The transhumanists moral code that justifies all of their actions is the notion of radical self-ownership. I own my body, the transhumanist says, so I have the right to do with it whatever I want, no matter how weird you find it. They believe in the right to do what they want as long as it hurts nobody else. Sound familiar? This is essentially the non-aggression principle. Most transhumanists are on the very libertarian side of personal freedoms, and their political diversity is more broad when it comes to questions of economics. Should the government fund transhumanist science? Thats more disputable. But they are sure that no third party should step in their way. They also tend to be very skeptical of government or corporate interference in tech. An entire presentation dealt with the problems that could come out of governments claiming a right to search machines (think iPhone). If you had technology inseparably attached to your body, what if the state could hack or spy on it? These are the sorts of questions Ive already watched many in the body hacking community grapple with. The man whod go on to become the Transhumanist presidential candidate in 2016 (who is an advisor on the film) actually spent a night at Gary Johnsons house in an unsuccessful bid to be his VP candidate. Gary gave him an honest shot but ultimately decided against it.

TLR: Who is the leader of the transhuman movement?

The transhumanist movement is extremely decentralized, so theres no specific leader. However, recently the recently formed Transhumanist Party adds some centralization to the political conquest of transhumanists. Zoltan Istvan ran for president on their ticket and would be widely considered a leader. Gennady Stolyarov, author of Death is Wrong, is now the chairman of that party.

TLR: Does the Transhuman community want to start becoming more involved in politics?

The transhumanists are not necessarily members of the transhumanist party. In general, they tend to want more legitimacy. Right now, licensed doctors and surgeons are concerned about performing transhumanist experiments because of the possibility of the state retaliating (such as removing their license). The result is that transhumanist experiments rely on legal loopholes and black markets, which is not favorable for any movement trying to gain legitimacy. While its unlikely that well see Transhumanist Party candidates winning elections any time soon, their introduction into the political sphere, in intellectual alliance with the Libertarian Party on many issues, shows that theyre trying to come out of the shadows so to speak. I spoke to many people concerned about discrimination against cyborgs, government intrusion, and other potential political issues in their respective futurist projections.

TLR: What does it mean to be transhuman? Do these people want to live forever?

Being transhuman is simply to use technology to evolve somehow past conventional human experience. See the first answer. With regards to immortality, thats a goal for many of them, but it wouldnt be considered a failure not to. The goals are diverse.

TLR: What is the end goal for transhumanism?

As a deeply futurist movement always striving for the next level, Im not sure that there is an end goal. In general, transhumanists want to continue expanding the human bodys function. New senses or limbs or deep integration with computers are end goals, but nearly limitless. The end goal of longevity is indefinite lifespan, and the end goal of super intelligence is something like singularity, but transhumanism as a whole is inherently limitless in theory.

TLR: What do you hope this documentary accomplishes?

After researching the topic pretty extensively, Ive come to be convinced that transhumanism is going to be relevant in the next few decades, politically and in society. Right now, the issue is seen as so fringe that virtually nobody opposes it, but the cycle of new technology would show that when it becomes marginally popular, people will see it as blasphemous somehow. After that, it could enter the political arena, where the libertarians and liberals support the right to do it, and religious conservatives fight against it. Given the possibility of it becoming so relevant later yet it being so under-reported now, I think history will struggle to realize why it has such a poorly recorded history of the movements roots. I hope my film will not only be illuminating now, but also fill in the gap of an underreported crucial moment in history.

TLR: What do you think the libertarian community can learn from transhumanism?

Transhuman science is often in a legal gray area. It certainly hasnt been specifically approved, and it always bypasses the FDA and other agencies. Like Uber, transhumanists are living by the philosophy of acting now rather than waiting for permission. The institutions and the government wont participate or condone many of these things. The DIY transhumanist says I dont need permission. Thats a mentality a lot of libertarians could learn from.

Ford FischerGary JohnsonlibertarianismNews2ShareTranshumanistmZoltan Istvan

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A Pulse on Fashion – NC State News

Posted: at 2:42 pm

Fashionistas are always looking for a dress that makes their hearts beat faster. But what about a dress that literally shows everyone else your racing pulse?

College of Textiles alumna Jazsalyn McNeils Pulse Dressboth visually stunning and technologically relevantincorporates LEDs that blink with the wearers heartbeat.McNeil talks about her dressand the broadening relationship between technology and fashion onFriday, Feb. 3, at 11 a.m.in the Teaching and Visualization Lab at Hunt Library.

McNeil worked with the NCSU Libraries Makerspace program on the dress, fusing art and design within the emerging fields of wearable technologies and interactive electronic textiles. The Makerspace helped her deploy biometric sensing and nanomaterials within her designs.

The talk is part of the NCSU Libraries Making Space series of public talks and workshops that raise awareness among women about access to tools and technology while lowering barriers to entry for first-time users of makerspaces.

McNeils work will also be on display for the entire month of February in the Hunt Librarys Apple Technology Showcase as part of Undergraduate Research in Action: The Pulse Dress, an interactive exhibition co-presented with the College of Textiles Nano-EXtended Textiles Research Group (NEXT). See the dress in action here.

Fashion and apparel are a part of our everyday lives, but they havent changed that much in the last few decades. Meanwhile technology is changing quickly all the time, McNeil says. With our phones, we escape reality, and were distracted from our environment. So I wanted to integrate technology in a way that could raise our awareness of ourselves and our environment.

Its not enough for me to just design something thats appealing. Im always searching for something with more purpose and meaning that we can integrate into our lives.

A member of NEXT, McNeil cites shows likeSpace Odyssey, movies likeThe Fifth Element and anime such as Ghost in the Shell as influences, more for their futuristic and transhuman ideas than for their literal costuming and visual design.

I was inspired by those topics, so it makes sense that that trickled down into the design and art that I produce.

McNeil currently works on projects for galleries and museums, as well as for apparel companies across the country.

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How human beings evolved from this disgusting creature – New York Post

Posted: at 2:41 pm


New York Post
How human beings evolved from this disgusting creature
New York Post
Finding and describing fossils is a critical way that we understand the history of life, and this is an important find, Matthew I. Palmer, professor of ecology, evolution and biology at Columbia University, told The Post. The evolutionary tree is ...

and more »

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Inside Amazon’s robot-run supermarket that needs just 3 human workers – New York Post

Posted: at 2:41 pm


New York Post
Inside Amazon's robot-run supermarket that needs just 3 human workers
New York Post
Amazon will utilize technology to minimize labor, a source close to the situation told The Post. Job-cutting technology isn't new for Amazon, which has increasingly used robots to automate its distribution warehouses. More recently, it has been ...
Amazon's supermarket of the future could operate with just 3 staff and lots of robotsBusiness Insider
Amazon Looking To Remove Human Workers From Grocery Stores, Says ReportDaily Caller
Amazon to open a giant ROBOT-run supermarket staffed by just three humans: Droid assistants will grab your groceries ...Daily Mail
Grub Street -TechRadar
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Japanese charged with human trafficking in Cambodia – Bangkok Post

Posted: at 2:41 pm

PHNOM PENH - A Cambodian court on Monday charged a Japanese man and two Cambodian suspects with illegally recruiting women who were allegedly trafficked to Japan for sexual exploitation.

Susumu Fukui, the 52-year-old owner of the Guinness Japanese restaurant, his 28-year-old Cambodian wife Lim Leakhena and 30-year-old employee Seng Chandy were each charged with "illegal recruitment for exploitation" in the Phnom Penh Municipal Court.

They were arrested on Saturday.

According to a police document, Mr Fukui and his wife last August recruited 10 Cambodian women to work in Japan, promising them monthly salaries ranging from $3,500 to $5,000, and lent them $500 each.

On Nov 8, 2016, the recruits arrived in Japan where they were put to work at the Ikaho Restaurant in Gunma Prefecture and forced into sexual servitude, according to the allegations.

On Dec 3, 2016, seven of them sought help from the Cambodian Embassy in Japan, which cooperated with Japanese authorities to have all 10 of them rescued and sent back to Cambodia.

A case was subsequently filed against Mr Fukui and the two others by the Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Department of the Phnom Penh Municipal Police.

Under Cambodian law, the suspects face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

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Dear Science: Why do we love our pets? – Washington Post

Posted: at 2:41 pm

Dear Science,

Why do we humans love our pets so much?

Here's what science has to say:

It really is an amazing question, said Clive Wynne, director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University.

Wynne has devoted his career to studying animal behavior and the evolutionary relationship between animals and people. He said it's easy to see why our pets would love us: The success of dogs [and other domesticated creatures] on the surface of the Earth is entirely due to the fact that we take some level of care of them.

In fact, some scientists have suggested that pets exhibit a form of parasitism taking food and shelter from humans without offering much in return. They argue that we love our pets because they have hoodwinked us into it, Wynne said.

He doesn't buy that argument. (Then again, he is a dog owner he's under the spell!) But he acknowledged there's no satisfying evolutionary explanation for that warm, gooey feeling we get when we look at our dogs and cats.

[Cats are popular pets, but how much do they like humans?]

This love story started with dogs, our most ancient animal companions. Analysis of dog and wolf genomes, along with numerous discoveries of ancient bone, suggests that humans domesticated our canine friends somewhere between 13,000 and 30,000 years ago. Wynne thinks it's likely that the animals started out as wolves that scavenged from human garbage pits; those willing to get closer to people got more food, and they evolved to become tamer over time. Eventually, humans felt comfortable around dogs and dogs liked being around us enough that we took them into our homes and recruited them for our hunts. Recent excavations at mammoth kill sites uncovered dog bones among the remains, suggesting that dogs and humans hunted together.

But even then, it's not clear that we loved dogs, Wynne said. That change happened around 10,000 years ago, when dogs started showing up in our artwork and burial grounds. Last year, scientists discovered an ancient cemetery near Siberia's Lake Baikal where 5,000- to 8,000-year-old dogs were buried right alongside their humans.

You get dog burials, which show there was a lot of care and attention paid to the burial, Wynne said, and they include grave goods [valuable items placed in the grave for use in the afterlife], which really seems like there was a strong indication of affection.

By ancient Egyptian times, household pets were laid to rest in elaborate tombs decorated with inscriptions, furnished with treasure and scented by incense. (Though archaeologists believe that some of the dogs were likely raised specifically to be killed, making the gesture seem somewhat less thoughtful.)

[Dear Science: Why do we cry?]

If dogs evolved to be the companions of human hunters, then cats came along to be farmers' pets. DNA evidence suggests that cats were first tamed by the Natufians, who lived in the Levant roughly 10,000 years ago and are often credited with being the inventors of agriculture. Cats, the logic goes, are very useful for catching the rodents that inevitably inhabit grain storehouses. As the animals started to congregate around human settlements, they became more social, developing the communication skills needed to deal with other cats and humans.

In the cases of both species, the process of domestication probably started with the animals themselves; tamer animals were better able to take advantage of the resources made available by human settlements. Then people got involved, selectively breeding the cutest, cuddliest and most cooperative creatures until we got the pets we know today.

So, that's how we came to love animals, but it still doesn't really explain why. We can't love dogs and cats simply because of their utility. For one thing, domesticated livestock are also useful, but we (typically) don't name cows or cry over movies about sheep that find their way home. For another, Wynne noted, dogs and cats really aren't that useful anymore.

My own dog, who I love out of all proportion, is utterly and completely useless, he said.

[Dear Science: Could my body include an atom from Shakespeare?]

For several decades, it was believed that pet ownership was good for humans' physical and mental health. But with further research, the picture has become less clear. A 2009 study of nearly 40,000 people in Sweden found that pet owners suffered from more mental health problems than their non-pet-owning peers.

Other theories suggest that the benefit of pet ownership could have more to do with other humans. For example, pets might be what's called an honest signal of their humans' wealth, demonstrating that their owners have so much time and money to spare that they can afford to keep a creature whose purpose is only cuteness.

Then again, some argue that our love for pets is purely social, rather than biological. After all, a 2015 survey of more than 60 countries found that, even though dogs were kept in 52 countries, they were considered companions in fewer than half of them. Harold Herzog, a psychologist at Western Carolina University, has written that love for pets is a contagious habit we catch from our peers, as evidenced by the rise and fall of fads in dog breed ownership. Perhaps the warm and gooey feeling we get when we look into a puppy's eyes is just a consequence of social pressure and Lassie Come Home.

As a scientist, Wynne isn't happy with any of the theories put forward to explain our love for our pets. He'd like to see more and better data perhaps an experiment that examined brain scans of people taken while they looked at cats and dogs.

But as someone who knows what it's like to love a dog, he was willing to indulge in some unscientific musing. Wynne noted that domesticated dogs are very childlike:They exhibit several behaviors usually found only among juveniles in wild animals, such as licking (or kissing) their owners' faces, and they're unable to survive on their own. When Wynne's family adopted their dog, his wife (who is an engineer and very practical, he said) remarked that perhaps they should have had more kids.

She perceived that same buttons were being pressed that were pressed when we had our child, Wynne said.

Maybe that's all there is to it: Humans are programmed to love soft and helpless things.

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Dear Science: Why do we love our pets? - Washington Post

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Content Curator – futurism.com

Posted: at 2:40 pm

Futurismis a digital media platform covering the scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations that will shape our future. Coverage topics include artificial intelligence, robotics, space exploration, virtual reality, and much more. Our content is currently read by over 20 million people per month across all our distribution platforms.

Were looking for an ambitious, creative, and thoughtful Curator to join our distributed video production team. Futurisms videos (alongside those published by our sub-brands,Explorist and Virtuality)net over 100 million views on Facebook per month. This wouldnt be remotely possible without the hard work of our content curators.

Most succinctly, Curatorsare the lifeblood of our video production process: they work directly with our video producers by researching and unearthing the best science and technology content on internet, period. They source story ideas, find footage, and plant the proverbial seed that eventually becomes an awesome, shareable video.

The ideal candidate will be intimately familiar with the media landscape, intensely ambitious, and well versed in attribution and proper sourcing. This is a part-time, remote position.

The job at a glance:

The ideal candidate will have:

You will be joining a team of 40+ content creators that are passionate about telling stories that will shape and influence prominent discussions about our future. Ourfounding team has built companies funded by top VCs, has been listed in the Inc. Top 500 fast growing companies list four separate times, and has had multiple major exits.

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