geekosystem

Pet owners probably accept the fact that they're sharing microbes with their furry friend to some degree or another. Parents also probably make this assumption about their children, because at the end of the day both pets and children are pretty disgusting animals. A new study says that, of the two, you probably share more microbes with your dog than with your kids.

Because we feel like maybe you need this right now, (we know we do) here are some videos of cute animals doing things. There's a dog talking about how pumped he is to get a cat, a cat training to be a ninja, and arguably the most obedient dog we've ever seen. Cute pet videos can't fix everything that's wrong with the world, but we're sure glad they're there.

We all know that animals have great noses -- especially bears, sharks, rats, and dogs -- and that they're far superior to our own lousy sniffers. We know this because we use man's best friend as trackers and detection dogs, because we're afraid of sharks if even a drop of blood hits the water, and because in 3rd Edition D&D most animal stat blocks include the Scent (Ex) special ability. But there's more to sniffing than just sheer olfactory might. According to a new study, the act of sniffing itself communicates the complex social status between animals.

How do you pick the dogs that are chosen for military and law enforcement service? Training is an expensive proposition, so it's in the best interest of everyone to only train those dogs that will do an excellent job. There's nothing worse than a dud dog, even if that's a thing I just made up. There's still nothing worse than that. Thankfully, DARPA is looking into scanning the brains of dogs in order to determine which ones to train, which sounds an awful lot like something out of the Fallout universe.

The human race has accomplished plenty since the day we first learned to wield tools such as a hammer and chisel. We've constructed towns, bustling cities, and -- most importantly -- the roadways that allow us to commute from one urban center to the next. Not that this interconnected network of paved ground does us any good since mankind has still failed to grasp the simple concept of traffic safety, namely crossing the street without ending up as roadkill. Traffic police in Romania are fed up with pedestrians' blatant disregard for designated crosswalks, opting to instead dash across busy streets at their own, oftentimes fatal, detriment. In an effort to raise awareness of this sheer idiocy, traffic police have released a series of TV ads highlighting the citizens that understand the function of those big white lines painted on the pavement are for: Stray dogs.

Have you ever thought to yourself that, thanks to our ability to form intelligible sentences and verbalize our current emotional state, we lost touch with those simpler primal days when such interactions were accomplished with visual cues? No, of course not, we're humans and evolution's divine providence saw to it that we ditch any superfluous appendages like tails for our own sake. One individual -- a self-proclaimed inventor by the name of Shota Ishiwatari -- seems to have a dissenting opinion on this matter since he has already begun soliciting financial backing on Indiegogo for his latest product called Tailly: A wearable tail that wags in relation to one's heart rate. We have no doubt in our minds that it will catch on in Japan, but for Western markets, Ishiwatari has plenty of convincing to do.

A raid on an illegal dog slaughterhouse in Taiwan turned up an especially bizarre and grisly sight this week -- a refrigerator full of hundreds of dried dog penises, which we think you'll agree qualifies as "bizarre and grisly" even in the context of "illegal dog slaughterhouse." The penises, which are sometimes sold as ingredients for herbal wines used locally as aphrodisiacs. Why exactly you'd need a stockpile of hundreds of them is beyond us, though that could have something to do with how hard we're working not to think about it right now.

Need proof that the rich really aren't that different from you and me? How's this -- they don't pick up their dog's poop when they think no one is looking, either. No, not even when they're only walking their dog on the turf at their luxury condo. That's why a condo community in Florida is making residents enter their dog's DNA into a new genetic database that will be used to match a poop to a pooch and identify which owners aren't cleaning up after their pets. Which is really nice to hear, because you know once resources start being devoted to things like this, we've clearly solved the big problems like world hunger, and can now put science to work on the really important issues of our age.

Science is great. Dogs are great. Dogs teaching science is amazing. Here are two dogs demonstrating how different types of chemical bonds work, or something. It's really hard to pay attention to what the voice-over is saying, because the dogs are so cute. The dogs represent atoms, and their toys are electrons. That's what we managed to get, anyway. It's almost too cute to count as educational, but we'll give it a pass.

We're all familiar with the situation where you see someone else yawn, and all of a sudden, you're yawning too, thinking that nothing would feel better than a nice nap right about now. Researchers studying yawn contagion (yes, there are researchers studying this) have come to some truly weird insights about the behavior. While yawns can prove to be contagious across species -- your dog will yawn if it sees you do so, and often vice versa -- catching a yawn seems to be a learned action, as puppies and babies don't show the same propensity to yawn when they see someone else do so.

If you were to, say, receive a phone call from your house phone, but all you could hear was some banging and scraping, what would you do? No words are spoken; it's just the foreboding noises coming across. For many, this event might never play out due to not having a house phone, but when Bruce Gardner got a call on his cell featuring this exact scenario, he called the police because he feared his house was being robbed. As it turns out, his dog had just gotten hold of the phone and accidentally called him.

Prepare to feel terrible about every time you've ever laughed and encouraged a dog that was chasing its tail, because it turns out that is basically like clapping and cheering on someone struggling with OCD, except that chasing a tail is way cuter than turning the lights on and off a set amount of times before leaving a room. A recent study in the journal PLoS One suggests that tail chasing could be a symptom of a canine analogue to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Truly, this is the saddest of all mental illnesses, with the possible exception of the obvious schizophrenia exhibited by every cat, ever,  anywhere in the history of time.

So, today on the Internet, you get to see dogs hump legs competitively for The Humpy Awards. This mind-blowing video is part of a promotion for a new series on AMC, Small Town Security. I don't see the connection, but I do see humping dogs. And those are some awesome trophies.

This is Geronimo, and he's a very clever dog that can do all sorts of tricks, including jumping rope double dutch. Just add that to the ever-lengthening list of tasks that can be performed by children and trained animals that are completely beyond my abilities. Watch and enjoy, but turn the volume down. 

The U.K. Ministry of Defense has recently admitted that between 2002 and 2011, it has euthanized 807 dogs used by soldiers fighting overseas. The MoD says that while efforts are made to find homes for most of its working dogs, the canines used in combat have been harder house. This led to an incredible 125 dogs being put down in 2009 alone.