Image courtesy of anna bÁlint
In a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, an infrared photograph of a Golden Retriever shows the low temperature of the dog's nose and its hot, warm body.
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Probably in the hearts of all the collectors, their own treasure is definitely the cutest existence in the world!
Furry paws, occasional stupidity, or dark little eyes...
To be more realistic, you can probably give thousands of examples of cute spots!
There must be that wet little nose. But have you ever thought that this little nose that seems to be used to sell cuteness actually contains a lot of little secrets.
A new study shows that dog noses are not only 100 million times more sensitive than our noses, but also can sense the faint thermal radiation of mammalian bodies. The finding helps explain why canines with impaired vision, hearing or smell are still able to hunt.
"It was a fascinating discovery." Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus from the University of Colorado, said, "It opens another window for us to understand the sensory world of highly evolved dog noses. ”
Pictured from pexels
Only a few animals can feel a faint radiant heat, such as black fire beetles, certain snakes, vampire bats, etc., which will use this ability to hunt.
Most mammals have bare, smooth skin around their nostrils, an area known as a nasal mirror. But the dog's nasal cavity is wet, lower than the temperature around it, and it contains a wealth of nerves, which further supports the fact that the dog's nose can detect not only odors, but also heat.
To test this idea, researchers from Lund University and Loland University in Hungary trained three pet dogs to choose between warm (31°c) and room-temperature objects, each placed at a distance of 1.6 meters. These dogs can't see or smell the difference between these objects, and scientists can only spot differences in temperature by touching the surface of the object.
At the end of the training, the double-blind experiment (i.e. neither the experimenter nor the subject knows the details) begins. The scientists noted that all three dogs successfully detected objects emitting weak thermal radiation.
Next, the researchers scanned the brains of 13 different breeds of pet dogs with functional magnetic resonance imaging machines while showing them objects that emitted neutral or weak thermal radiation. The somatosensory cortex on the left side of the dog brain responds more sensitively to heat stimuli than neutral stimuli, and the scientists also found a cluster of 14 voxels (i.e., three-dimensional pixels) in the left hemisphere of the dog's brain, but not in the right cerebral hemisphere, and there was no response to neutral temperature stimulation in any part of the dog's brain.
Together, the scientists said, dogs, like vampire bats, are able to sense faint hot spots that activate a specific area of their brain by this infrared radiation. They suspect that dogs inherited this ability from their ancestors, the gray wolf, who may have used this ability to sniff out warm prey bodies while hunting.
Among other things, this work at least proves that in Jack London's Book The Call of the Wild, Buck's extraordinary tracking of prey "not just through sight, sound, or smell, but some other, more subtle sense exists," is not entirely fictional.
Tadpole staves compiled from: science
Translator: Dog Grid