Do dogs smile at us? When they open their mouths in a grin and their tongue sticks out, are they smiling at us? Most of us think that expression means they are smiling but researchers say there's no strong evidence for that to be the case.

The problem with dog expressions is that our research tools are typically subjective, and paired with our anthropomorphizing tendencies, it's very possible that we misinterpret what we see on dogs' faces.

In fact, there's very little objective research to support the idea that dogs "smile." Some findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, show that this particular expression, called "relaxed open mouth" in dogs, typically occurs in positive settings, like when dogs are inviting one another to play.

But whether it's really what we would call a smile, or whether dogs are directing it at us intentionally to communicate something, remains unknown.

However, there have been expressions which could suggest that dogs try to communicate and develop a special bond with humans, particularly the puppy dog eyes. Studies have suggested that when dogs exhibited that expression, there is some connection being formed between the dog and humans.

For her research, Kaminski and colleagues visited a dog shelter, where they used something called a facial action coding system (FACS) to measure the minute facial motions dogs made while they interacted with people.

Afterward, the researchers kept track of the time it took for each dog to get adopted. The scientists discovered that "the more the dogs produced that movement [puppy dog eyes], the quicker they were rehomed," said Kaminski. No other behavior the researchers analyzed had as strong an effect.

So whether dogs are smiling at us intentionally, there is no objective research the would suggest so. However, we can say that dogs have a way of communicating through expressions which might have developed through their history of domestication.

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I have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator a couple of times before. When I first learned about it, I was fascinated because I never knew how to define my personality. I knew I was an introvert but that was about it. Human personality however is more complex than a single trait.

Psychologists and researchers have been criticizing and debunking the MBTI ad nauseam mostly because it doesn't have any scientific evidence to back up the results. Moreover, many test takers have observed that their outcomes change over time, meaning the MBTI doesn't perfectly capture human personality based on its four categories.

Some research suggests the MBTI is unreliable because the same person can get different results when retaking the test. Other studies have questioned the validity of the MBTI, which is the ability of the test to accurately link the "types" to outcomes in the real world — for example, how well people classified as a certain type will perform in a given job.

One limitation is the MBTI's black-and-white categories: You are either an extrovert or introvert, a judger or a feeler. The MBTI may be missing even more nuances by assessing only four aspects of personality differences.

I have also come to see the flaws in the MBTI's design but it doesn't mean that the results taken from the test are completely useless. Rather, one can compare and gauge their assessment of themselves to what the test indicates.

In this sense, the MBTI can serve as a starting point for self-exploration by giving people a tool and a language to reflect on themselves and others. The test is "a portal to an elaborate practice of talking and thinking about who you are."

You can use the MBTI in whatever way you wish. It could give you a starting point for self-introspection, where you would probably get a good idea of your tendencies.

But remember that your personality does not have the limitations that the MBTI sets. It has more facets and dimensions. It is a lot messier. Sometimes it can be confusing. The thing we need to do is to embrace every part of our personality instead of trying to box ourselves in one category or another.

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This cute little pit bull loves his pillow. Wherever Draco goes, his pillow follows. However, one cannot avoid incidents from happening to such a delicate plaything and when one thing led to another, the pillow got ripped.

Luckily, Draco’s grandmother saw what was happening and leaped into action. “We think [the pillow] was so worn out it just easily ripped,” O’Cain said. “My mom freaked out and grabbed it and yelled, ‘I’ll fix it, Draco!’”

Once the pillow was fixed, little Draco rushed to cuddle his favorite pillow and all was well again. Despite the possibility of such incidents happening again, the O'Cain family says they will continue putting the pillow back together until Draco moves on.

(Image credit: Allie O'Cain)

The legendary architect of several famous edifices, including the Mesa Lab in Colorado and the Louvre Pyramid standing at the entrance of the Louvre, has passed away a few days ago at the age of 102.

His career spans over 60 years and his name has already been etched in the annals of modern architectural history. Much of his work was mostly likely influenced by his mentors, the two Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. In a way, his death marks the end of an era.

Though he has made much success in most of the projects he has done, there were a few failed projects as well including Boston's John Hancock Tower and New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Despite that, the legacy he left will live on for generations to come. To see a list of his most notable works, check here.

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The more we become aware about something that we had no previous knowledge or proper understanding about, the more we begin to empathize with what people deal with.

For many people, ADHD probably seems like an excuse. That those who suffer from it are annoying and a drag to deal with. But they don't see what kind of struggle people with ADHD actually go through. They simply dismiss and label them as "problem children" or "difficult people".

To give a little bit of clarity to what people with ADHD actually feel and go through in their mind and with their emotions, read the story of Andrew Askins who has had ADHD and only knew about it at 20. And the illustrations by Dani Donovan can also help explain the thought process of a person with ADHD.

-via Book of Joe

(Image credit: Dani Donovan/Twitter)

Researchers have generated what could most likely be the loudest possible sound that can be created. Registering at 270 decibels, the sound was created by firing tiny jets of water through an x-ray laser.

Now, this is an interesting feat as we may not actually hear such a sound within normal circumstances. The only reason why it hit 270 dB was because they blasted the jets in water.

Oddly enough, in air, a sound can't get any higher than about 194 decibels and in water it's around 270. This is because sound is an example of something where the measurements break down at either end of the scale.

There is an upper limit to the sound that can be created through any medium. The reason is that, as sound travels, it breaks down the medium until the medium has reached its threshold and it can no longer produce a louder or more intense sound.

This is what happened when the researchers zapped micro-jets of water (between 14 and 30 micrometres in diameter) with an X-ray laser. When the short X-ray pulses hit the water it vaporized and generated a shockwave. This shockwave then traveled through the jet and formed copies of itself in a "shockwave train" made of alternating high and low pressure zones. In other words, a very loud underwater sound.

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Churches are some of the relics that show the history of architectural design. From the romanesque style of the medieval era to the gothic which was then succeeded by renaissance architecture, designs have evolved depending on the zeitgeist.

Our contemporary times have brought about more modern designs. And French photographer Thibaud Poirier captures some of these in his collection called Sacred Spaces.

The inspiring variety of church designs swing from style to style: the Brutalist aesthetic of Tokyo’s Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the minimalist approach of Berlin’s Kapelle, or the warm, cozy ambiance lent by the latticed wood details of Notre Dame de Chêne’s impressive walls and ceilings.

Taken from a consistent angle — flanked by pews on both sides and facing the altar — Poirier’s amazing eye for symmetry and detail underline the grandeur these modernist structures possess, impressive enough to rival their much older counterparts.

“And yet despite their great stylistic differences, the glue between these churches remains invisible to the human eye yet vibrates within each of us: the emotional state created whilst one is present,” the photographer says. “The sense of belonging. The conviction of something larger than us all.”

-via Nag on the Lake

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For those who have watched the penultimate episode of the critically acclaimed series Game of Thrones can understand the ire over the final season and its latter half. 

After eight seasons, we have reached the climax of the almost decade-long series and we all want a satisfying end to this political, fantastical saga. And a lot of people feel that the latest episodes have not been on a par with the rest of the series.

A Change.org petition started last week titled "Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers," has surpassed one million signatures from fans who feel that "This series deserves a final season that makes sense."

The petition was first posted on Reddit's r/freefolk page, following the airing of episode 4 of Game of Thrones of the show's last season, with an impressive audience of 17.2 million viewers.

A week later, and after the airing of the penultimate episode which drew harsh criticism, the petition had already been signed by over one million of the show's fans.

Of course, it took two years from the previous season to produce the final season. To be fair, the writers did not have any source material to adapt from. But then again, the producers have also deviated on several plot points from the book so there's no surprise that we got what we got.

The petitioner for the show's final season remake also concedes that they don't expect HBO to cave in to the fans' demands but they simply wanted to send a message about their dissatisfaction. On Monday, we get to see the finale of the whole series. Hopefully, the final episode gets to redeem the rest.

(Image credit: Helen Sloan/HBO; IMDb)

And it's not just fear. Dogs can sense or read different kinds of human emotions and moods through smell. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Naples and the results were published in the journal Animal Cognition.

They found that when owners smelled happy and fresh, their dogs were happy and inquisitive, and much more amenable to strangers. However, when they were afraid, the opposite was true. The dogs could smell their owners fear, and they were generally much more guarded and afraid themselves, sticking close to their owners, and not interacting with humans.

Even more studies were carried out, using samples from the movies The Jungle Book and The Shining. Owners were placed in a room, with their dogs and a stranger, after having watched each of the movies. Then sweat samples were included from the owners from each of the movies when the owner was feeling either fear or joy. It turned out that the behavior of the dogs actually mirrored that of their owners.

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While tinkering with his lucky cat or maneki neko, Martin Fitzpatrick decided to go a bit further and play around with it a little bit more. What he produced is an amazing build of a lucky cat that displays a message with its spinning arm.

The display uses the persistence of vision effect to generate an image 'in the air'. By repeatedly outputting light at a specific point in the rotation, and with a short enough cycle time, the viewer's eye does not register any change in brightness.

Managing to generate a static image depends on hitting the exact same point on the next turn around the loop. By adding a slight over- or under-scan you can make the message display rotate.

He also explains his process of building and programming the lucky cat so that it shows the message "Hello Python".

(Image credit: Martin Fitzpatrick/Imgur)

It's a very controversial topic but evolutionary theory tries to understand the process by which nature has developed variations and diversity on one hand and maintaining certain strains or features on the other. And this is just one aspect of it.

In this opinion piece by Razib Khan, he shares his thoughts as an evolutionary geneticist and reconciling that with his worldview and how he thinks that evolutionary theory has, in a way, formed a good foundation for us to understand the natural order.

Charles Darwin founded the discipline of evolutionary biology along with Alfred Russel Wallace. Evolutionary ideas were in the air before Darwin, but his central contribution was to offer a mechanism through which species could change over time: natural selection operating upon heritable variation. Darwin also established the broad contours of the questions that evolutionary biologists explore even today.

The most surprising aspect of Darwin’s work is that it did not have a correct scientific theory of inheritance: He didn’t know what caused organisms to vary in ways that could be passed down from parent to child, which is to say he didn’t know about genes. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk, pioneered the field of genetics at the same time that Darwin’s fame was rising, but genetics as an organized body of research emerged only in the first decade of the 20th-century.

Genetics provided the answer of how variation is maintained. Population genetics created the mathematical basis upon which 20th-century evolutionary biology developed, becoming the “Neo-Darwinian Synthesis.”

There is no doubt that evolution is the mechanism by which organisms adapt to their environment and the different situations that occur in nature. It is genetics that maintains variation among organisms and helps us to study the dynamics of interaction and inheritance among other things. 

Further research is being done for us to get a more thorough and comprehensive grasp of evolutionary biology and theory. But we cannot deny that organisms have been evolving. From structures to behavior, we can observe the changes that occur in living things over time.

-via Evolution News

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Since our resources are limited and continue to be depleted as global demand soars, population increases by the minute, and nature struggles to replenish its stores, researchers try to find ways to create materials with similar properties to natural resources as alternatives for the actual thing.

But designers are finding it difficult to replicate the intricate structures and functions that different natural materials possess. Although, there have been successful devices that have the capacity to imitate living creatures' behavior through machine learning like the recent hummingbird drone. It's far from perfect.

One other example of biomimetic inventions is a snapping device mimicking the Venus Flytrap:

A biomimetic “snapping” device made of hydrogel has been invented by an international team of engineers, reports Phys.org. But the device, inspired by the Venus flytrap, is a far cry from its biological counterpart. 

The living plant does far more than snap shut. It incorporates toothed edges that form a cage for its prey, trigger hairs able to distinguish between living and lifeless objects, and digestive juices that obtain nutrients from trapped bugs. Just getting the artificial device to snap quickly was a major challenge.

Perhaps further research and insight from observing the Venus Flytrap would help researchers design a device that would imitate the features of the plant. Also, it depends on the objectives that the researchers set out as well. Whether their purpose is to make an artificial Venus Flytrap or not, and why.

Other materials were also brought into focus. In particular, nacre or mother of pearl because of its versatility and strength. Scientists seek to make a synthetic counterpart of the material. The challenge they face is its uniqueness and the heavy requirements needed to replicate it.

One natural substance scientists have looked to in creating synthetic materials is nacre, also known as mother-of-pearl. An exceptionally tough, stiff material produced by some mollusks and serving as their inner shell layer, it also comprises the outer layer of pearls, giving them their lustrous shine.

But while nacre’s unique properties make it an ideal inspiration in the creation of synthetic materials, most methods used to produce artificial nacre are complex and energy intensive.

Surely, if more resources are given to biomimetic projects then we would be able to reduce our dependence on nature for materials to build things. That is not to say that this is the panacea for our environmental problems but with other efforts, this could help reinvigorate nature and give them time to breathe and restore its lush abundance.

(Image credit: Hannes Grobe/AWI; Wikimedia Commons, CC by SA 3.0)

As time passes, things change, get replaced, and decay. From a bustling city filled commerce, activity, and people, some spaces in the city and buildings become abandoned and forgotten. Some are torn down while others just dilapidate and fade away into the background. But some people find new ways to breathe life into these buildings and city spaces by repurposing them.

We love witnessing the creative repurposing of such abandoned city spaces — factories that become cool lofts and offices, hotels that spring up out of old warehouses, and parks built atop old subway tracks. 

These reuses support the community and revive the decaying parts of a changing city, making it feel alive and whole again. By recycling materials, restoring historic details, and even wildly reimagining what a certain space could be, derelict buildings are allowed to live a second, purposeful life and, in turn, revitalize entire neighborhoods.

Uproxx gives us a list of some breathtaking projects that turn old buildings into artistic and modern landscapes.

(Image credit: Koetjuh/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Reddit user MagicSP shared a fan art of KonoSuba characters Kazuma and Aqua which greets students as they enter the school's library to encourage them as they study for their upcoming final exams.

These shocked faces are some of the many wild expressions these two have over the course of the series' two seasons, and is likely a result of one of their mistakes. But in a roundabout way, this really is an inspiring image.

Due to Kazuma's incredibly high Luck skill, the series often sees Kazuma and the others fail upwards. No matter how big their mistakes are, they often come out okay in the end thanks to smart twists of their usual flaws. Each victory comes with a hilariously bad consequence, but there is a victory. So maybe these students will feel better knowing that they could still somehow make it through their exams no matter how bad they do. It works for Kazuma.

If you are feeling anxious or frustrated with stuff that you are going through, hopefully this will give you some encouragement and cheer you on to just keep going. If somebody like Kazuma get through life despite all the bad experiences they face every day, so can you. Ganbatte!

(Image credit: MagicSP/Reddit)

Cancer research has made strides in trying to understand how these cells mutate as well as how our bodies fight off these cancer cells. Recently, a collaboration between researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center have developed tools that can detect and track the epigenetic evolution of cancer.

Described in papers May 15 in Nature and April 23 in Nature Communications, the new approach allows researchers to isolate individual cancer cells sampled from patients and map the epigenetic marks on the cells’ chromosomes. Epigenetic marks are chemical marks on DNA or on DNA-support proteins (called histones) that help control which genes are switched “on” and which are switched “off” in a cell. They essentially program what the cell does and what it doesn’t do.

The first step that researchers need to know about the mutation of cancer cells is exactly where it starts, what the exact triggers are, and how the mutated cells respond to various treatments. Their findings can also help in formulating treatments that would target the specific cause of the cancer as well as prevent them from spreading. But it will be a challenge.

Landau and other researchers have previously shown how a diversification occurs at the genetic level in cancers, such that different cells within a tumor contain distinct sets of gene mutations. 

“This enormous diversity within each cancerous cell population means that in each patient, we’re dealing with thousands of variants of the cancer rather than just one entity, and all this variation increases the cancer’s potential to adapt to challenges such as drug therapy,” said Landau, who’s an oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “Here we’re extending that concept to show that there is epigenetic diversity as well.”

(Image credit: Susan Arnold/National Institutes of Health, Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)