It's been a weird year for skateboards. As foretold, are "here", but they're either really limited in what they can do or they're not actually hovering. Fortunately, Peru's Otto the Skateboarding Bulldog is here to set us straight: What matters isn't how the board moves, it's how cool it looks when a dog is the one riding it.
The BBC has an interview with the company founder, Stephen Chen, who further explains how it works. Asked if Petnostics may just add to owner's anxieties about their dog or cat's health without really telling them anything definitive, Chen replied that it isn't meant to be a diagnostic tool for owners, but that the info could help veterinarians with their analysis of the animal's health. While interesting, it sounds like more of a novelty or curiosity at this point. Besides offering the likelihood of getting dog or cat pee on your hands, it seems like it would be easy to misinterpret the results, since the app lists medical conditions that could explain the readings from the strip without much context.
It's hard enough to find good people for a given job. Harder still: finding the right dog. The U.S. military employs and deploys canines in a variety of roles throughout the armed services - bomb detection, search and rescue, post-traumatic stress disorder therapy - and each dog selected for those roles goes through a rigorous training regimen that can cost tens of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of the dog. Now, DARPA wants to test for pooch potential with brain scans, hoping to "optimize the selection of ideal service dogs."
A dog can accurately detect the early presence of lung cancer by sniffing patients' breath, doctors in Germany say. While researchers have known for some time that dogs can sniff out the telltale signs of other forms of cancer, this is the first study that proves dogs can reliably smell this particular kind.
