Researchers find your dog might actually have a preferred TV show
Their findings indicated that excitable dogs were more likely to react as if TV stimuli existed in a 3D environment, while fearful dogs responded more to non-animal sounds such as car noises or doorbells.
Separate scientific research revealed that dogs' comprehension of human speech significantly improves when spoken at a slower tempo.
This slower speech rate matches the receptive abilities of dogs, allowing them to better understand commands.
The study, published in the Plos Biology journal, analysed vocal sounds from 30 dogs and humans speaking in various contexts across five languages.
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Telegraph
39 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Take-at-home drug can ‘disarm' cancer
A take-at-home tablet could boost the way cancer patients respond to chemotherapy, according to its developers. The drug, known as KCL-HO-1i, works by disarming a defence mechanism that tumours use to protect themselves. Early tests on mice found the drug even helped chemotherapy-resistant tumours to respond to treatment. It is hoped KCL-HO-1i can be trialled on humans, with researchers suggesting it could one day be a 'valuable companion drug' to chemotherapy, helping patients to avoid more aggressive treatments. Chemotherapy is used to treat many kinds of cancer and works by disrupting the way cancer cells grow and divide. However, it is not as effective as it should be in some patients because the body's own immune cells can act as a barrier around tumours. These cells produce a protein called heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1), which helps shield the tumour from the immune system and block the effects of chemotherapy. Exciting step forward KCL-HO-1i, created at King's College London (KCL), targets this protein to make tumours more responsive to treatment. Prof James Arnold, the head of the tumour immunology group at the university, said it discovered the cells responsible for protecting the body's immune system 'play a key role in blocking chemotherapy'. |He said: 'By targeting the enzyme they produce using KCL-HO-1i, we were able to help beneficial immune cells and chemotherapy drugs become significantly more effective. 'In laboratory models, even chemotherapy-resistant tumours became responsive to treatment, which is a really exciting step forward.' The drug has been designed for patients to take at home as a tablet between chemotherapy sessions. Early tests on mice, with the results published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, found the drug made breast cancer tumours more responsive to different types of chemotherapy. Researchers are now hopeful that trials involving patients with breast cancer and other forms of the disease could begin within two years. James Spicer, a professor of experimental cancer medicine at KCL, said: 'Chemotherapy remains a key part of treatment for many patients with cancer, but too often it is not as effective or long-lasting as we might like. 'This research has identified a key reason for these limitations, and discovered a drug that we are keen to test in the clinic alongside established chemotherapy drugs.' Miraz Rahman, a professor of medicinal chemistry at KCL, added: 'If human trials are successful, KCL-HO-1i could become a valuable companion drug to existing cancer therapies – helping more patients to benefit from the treatments that are already available and reduce the need for more aggressive cancer therapies in the future.' The King's College London scientists have launched a spin-out company called Aethox Therapeutics. Tanya Hollands, the research information manager at Cancer Research UK, which supported the study alongside funding from the Medical Research Council, said: 'Researchers are increasingly learning how to make better use of existing cancer treatments, whether it's using them differently or in combination with new medicines, like this work suggests. 'Using combination therapies can help bring improved treatment options to patients more quickly, safely and affordably, because some components of the treatment have already been tested and used in the clinic. 'While early stage, it's exciting to see this potential new way to disarm cancer's ability to avoid detection by the immune system with a new drug, while also boosting the effectiveness of chemotherapy, and we look forward to seeing how this work progresses.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Oh God no, Dad!' The makers of TV's most terrifying monsters reveal their repulsive secrets
When special effects artist Aaron Sims first read the script for Stranger Things, he was struck by how vague the description was for the show's centrepiece monster. 'It basically said, 'The Demogorgon is a tall, lanky creature that eats children,'' recalls Sims. 'I'm thinking, 'OK, that's scary – but what does that actually look like?'' What happened when he posed this question to the series creators Matt and Ross Duffer? 'They said, 'We have no idea – come up with something.'' For Sims, who has worked on films such as The Incredible Hulk, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men, this was a relief. 'When there's already a fanbase, there is a lot of scrutiny and expectation. The fans either love it or hate it – and there's nothing you can do. Working on The Incredible Hulk, for example, took years. So when it's a new creature, a lot of people get excited.' This near-blank canvas led Sims to an unlikely source of inspiration: the snapping mouth of a turtle. 'When a turtle opens its jaws,' he says, 'it looks like it has rows of teeth – but they're actually fibres that draw food inward.' He combined this with a Venus flytrap and the result was that uniquely terrifying head that blooms open like a flower, revealing concentric rings of teeth, then clamps down on its prey, usually a screaming child. The Duffer brothers wanted only one modification: no face. Fans of Stranger Things, which returns later this year, will find plenty to fear in Alien: Earth, which launches this week. Series creator Noah Hawley has promised a terrifying expansion of the film franchise's already frightening monsters, introducing new creatures that will rival – and even surpass – the iconic, swoop-skulled, chest-bothering, teeth-within-teeth xenomorphs. 'I think we're giving them a run for their money, certainly,' Hawley has said. Alien: Earth, which is a prequel to the first 1979 film, leans heavily into unsettling body horror, too, with new creatures such as the T Ocellus, a jellyfish-like parasite that dislodges the eyes of other organisms in order to seize control of them from within. These newcomers will ensure the series isn't just recycling established monsters, but introducing fresh causes of terror and revulsion. Like Sims on Stranger Things, prosthetic makeup designer Barrie Gower leaned heavily on nature when he was creating his monstrous designs for The Infected, the term given to humans who get the brain infection in postapocalyptic zombie horror The Last of Us. Fungus became an integral part of the creative process, with Gower and his team buying so many bags of 'grow your own mushroom kits' for the studio to photograph and 3D print that they soon had 15 species on their hands. 'Fungus,' says Gower, 'is just such an interesting and beautiful kind of growth. There's so much to play with.' Gower effectively had a 'superpower' for creating monsters out of mushrooms: he hates them, despising everything from their smell to their texture. 'It became quite easy to come up with designs that repulsed me,' he says. Along with his mushroom aversion, Gower also has trypophobia, an intense discomfort triggered by the sight of clusters of small holes or bumps. 'It gives you goosebumps,' he says. However, rather than avoiding the formations that make his skin crawl, he employed them for maximum grotesqueness in his designs for how The Infected look, finding the perfect guinea pig in his daughter Lottie, who shares his trypophobia. 'If she's like, 'Oh God no dad, I don't like the look', I know we've succeeded.' The White Walkers, those furrow-faced ice demons in Game of Thrones, required an entirely different approach. Costume designer Michele Clapton envisioned them wearing dark armour that looked salvaged and repurposed, resulting in an austere, unwieldy look. 'It was so, so brutal to make,' Clapton says. 'The cutting and the bending of the metal was incredibly labour intensive. The armorists just loathed it because they really cut themselves. It's almost like a huge cheese grater.' The final pieces of armour proved so hazardous that the team actually had to create much safer leather duplicates for fight sequences, meticulously painted to mimic metal. Protecting all the prosthetics also proved difficult, given the sharp edges. Another major challenge, ironically, was keeping the White Walkers warm while filming in near freezing temperatures. 'We had hot-water bottles we could place inside the costumes,' says Clapton. 'But as there were so many prosthetics, you had to be really careful, because they could easily tear.' In fact, keeping performers comfortable in elaborate costumes and prosthetics is a major headache for monster creators. Gower encountered this with the Bloater – the hulking, spore-spewing, elaborately ridged behemoth in The Last of Us. 'We built this big suit that, in terms of size, was like wearing a sofa,' he says. 'It was made out of a very soft foam latex material. It's like a huge sponge, but split into six sections and zipped on to the performer.' There was one very predictable consequence: 'You just got really hot.' The inside of the costume could become so sweltering that, between shots, the team had to unzip the back and fan down Adam Basil, who portrayed the Bloater, sometimes even putting him in a pop-up tent complete with an air-conditioning unit on full blast to cool him down. According to Gower, the huge weight, restricted movement and the need for agility combined to make the Bloater costume ultimately unworkable. The team ended up enlisting the help of Wētā FX in New Zealand, who took detailed scans of all the Bloater's textures and created a digital version. Such mega-budget productions give creators the luxury of experimentation, with digital backup plans should their monster imaginings go awry. But on shows such as Doctor Who, it's a different story – as special effects artist Neill Gorton discovered. On the BBC's cult show, he encountered something every bit as scary as the Time Lord's weekly foes: a very limited budget. 'It was a comedown in one way,' he says, 'coming from working in Hollywood. I had a production design friend who introduced me to Doctor Who. When I asked what it was like, he said, 'It's fun – but they just don't have money.' I thought, 'Well, what the hell, I just want to work on it.' And sometimes it can actually be more fun, because you've got to be more creative.' Take the Weeping Angels, those statue-like alien humanoids that are able to send their victims back in time with a simple touch, gorging on the 'time energy' this releases. Producers had initially envisioned using numerous statues, believing that costumed performers painted as statues would resemble street performers too closely. But there was a problem. 'The sheer number of statues required would have been impossible given the timeframe,' says Gorton. 'You would need a different statue for every pose. That would have been a minimum of 30 statues.' Forced to find an alternative, he suggested a design that was part prosthetic, part costume, part body paint. 'The producers thought it was ridiculous. But we literally had no choice!' he says. Gorton would paint the actors, attach fabric, then 'glue it all together and hope for the best'. At that point, he realised how little time he and the team had left to bring the idea to life – just two weeks, compared to the five they would normally have to prepare for an episode. Sadly, this realisation came too late: Gorton had already talked everyone into his idea. The result? 'A total scramble!' They discovered that the masks used to create the Weeping Angels' haunting blank stare left the performers unable to see. Fortunately, this wasn't a huge issue, since the creatures had to remain perfectly still – a feat the team achieved by having the actors sit on a bicycle seat attached to a hidden pole. 'On a bigger budget,' says Gorton, 'you would never go down that road. But given no choice, we just had to be smart and quick about it.' Of course, it isn't just the pressure of budgets and time that lead to human-being-based effects. The Duffer brothers were adamant from the start: the Demogorgon would be portrayed by a performer in a suit. This presented probably the biggest conundrum when it came to designing the creature. 'Its legs are unusually long,' says Sims. 'It has kind of an extra joint. That makes it very challenging for an actor – to be put into stilts and have to run around and jump. The question was, 'How do I keep the design the Duffer brothers love – but make it work for a person in a suit?'' Whatever the challenges and the solutions, Sims finds there is always one benefit of working with flesh-and-blood performers: they ground any design in reality. 'It's important to find things in nature the human eye can identify with,' he says. 'If you take a human thing that's scary, then you add all those things to it, that makes it even more scary.' Asked how he makes monsters such as The Infected so deeply disturbing, Gower makes a similar point: taking everyday things like mushrooms and making them seriously creepy is a guaranteed win. 'Using realistic source material is the key,' he says. 'Keeping things familiar is always going to make them more terrifying. It just gives you goosebumps.' Alien: Earth is on Disney+ from 13 August
The Independent
5 hours ago
- The Independent
NASA Curiosity rover discovers coral-like flower-shaped rocks on Mars
NASA's Curiosity Rover has taken images of coral-like and flower-shaped rocks on Mars, which have been estimated to be billions of years old. On July 24, the rover sent images of a wind-eroded rock about one inch wide, resembling a piece of a coral reef. NASA has said that the rover has taken many images of rocks of this type. The space agency noted that when liquid water still existed on the planet, it carried dissolved minerals into the cracks of rocks. When the liquid dried, it deposited hardened minerals. 'This common process, seen extensively on Earth, has produced fantastic shapes on Mars, including a flower-shaped rock,' the agency said in a statement. NASA noted that the 'unique shapes' seen today came to be after billions of years of sandblasting. A uniquely shaped rock nicknamed 'Paposo' was also found on July 24. Similarly, another rock shaped like a flower was discovered in 2022. According to NASA, the flower rock is believed to have formed as mineralizing liquids went through conduits in the rock. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the rover, which is leading its Mars mission. After travelling for eight months and 352 million miles, the rover landed on Mars in 2012. NASA noted that it was the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars at the time. The rover has explored as much as 22 miles of the planet and previously found chemical and mineral evidence of previous habitable environments. According to NASA, the rover is continuing to gather samples and data from a time when Mars may have hosted microbial life. The one-inch rock was found in the Gale Crater, an impact basin. In June, Curiosity took images of a geological structure called 'spiderwebs' because of its pattern of ridges, also indicating that Mars previously had water that has since hardened. 'The images and data being collected are already raising new questions about how the Martian surface was changing billions of years ago,' NASA said in a June statement. 'The Red Planet once had rivers, lakes, and possibly an ocean. Although scientists aren't sure why, its water eventually dried up and the planet transformed into the chilly desert it is today,' the agency added. 'Remarkably, the boxwork patterns show that even in the midst of this drying, water was still present underground, creating changes seen today.' 'Eons of sandblasting by Martian wind wore away the rock but not the minerals, revealing networks of resistant ridges within,' said the agency.
