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1.

Dogs mouth-lick to communicate with angry humans

Date: November 28, 2017

Source: University of Lincoln

Summary: New research has found that dogs lick their mouths as a response to looking at angry human faces, suggesting that domestic canines may have a functional understanding of emotional information.

Animal behaviour researchers in the UK and Brazil have found that dogs lick their mouths as a response to angry human faces, according to new study.

Scientists examined the behaviour of dogs in response to emotionally significant images and sounds, and found that mouth licking in domestic dogs is not simply a response to food or uncertainty, but appears to be used as a signal to try to communicate with humans in response to visual cues of anger.

Significantly, audio cues of angry human voices did not elicit the same response.

Dogs were exposed simultaneously to two facial expressions (one positive and one negative from the same individual), which could be either human or canine of either sex, along with a sound, which could be positive or negative from the same species and gender.

The findings, published in the scientific journal Behavioural Processes, shine new light on our understanding of the emotional world of dogs.

The research was conducted by researchers from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the University of Lincoln, UK.

Lead author Natalia Albuquerque from the University of Sao Paulo, said: "Mouth-licking was triggered by visual cues only (facial expressions). There was also a species effect, with dogs mouth-licking more often when looking at humans than at other dogs. Most importantly, the findings indicate that this behaviour is linked to the animals' perception of negative emotions."

The researchers believe that this behavioural trait may have been selected during domestication. The findings, combined with previous evidence of the cognitive processing of emotional expressions, suggest that dogs may have a functional understanding of emotional information and greatly increase our understanding of their emotional world.

Co-author Professor Daniel Mills of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln, said: "Humans are known to be very visual in both intra and inter-specific interactions, and because the vision of dogs is much poorer than humans, we often tend to think of them using their other senses to make sense of the world. But these results indicate that dogs may be using the visual display of mouth-licking to facilitate dog-human communication in particular."

2.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell

A WANTED MAN

That’s hardly enough to distinguish me around here, of course. I’ve heard it said that a percentage of Alaska’s population is always fleeing something - the authorities, spouses, children, civilization. By comparison, I have it easy. It’s just a couple of old priests hunting me, and I know them both. I could take them if it came to that, and it won’t.

I’ll be honest up front. They’re coming after me for the most mundane of reasons. The only thing slightly extraordinary is that they’re coming at all. For a while, I thought they would just forget about me, and that I’d be able to live out my days like most fugitives here: not entirely free from want, but free from those who want you. But no, first one sent a letter and then the other: these initial letters just suggestions, of course. Then a second round, with a request. And the third round, with an order. Come home.

Now, I served in the army. I know what it means to disobey an order, even a bishop’s, and yet I did.

Let them come.

They say they will. This Friday, two days from today. My superiors (the bishop himself, they’d have me believe, and his right-hand man) are flying all the way out here to my lonely home in the bush to haul me in for the crime of believe it or not-growing old. Apparently you can’t be seventy-three and live in southwestern Alaska, though this fact seems lost on a good portion of the population here in Bethel. But no, it’s been decided. It’s time I came in, returned stateside, or, as those here say, Outside. When I’ve asked what I’m to do in retirement, they’ve said, Rest, write-almost sixty years in the bush, what stories you must have!

A younger man will replace me, I’m told, but who are they kidding? Silver-haired fifty somethings count as young priests these days. And the fact is, fifty may be too old-if the silverhair being moved here is from, say, Phoenix. Me, I grew into this environment. I came during the war, left for seminary, and returned to stay. I’ve had fifty-six years to get acclimated, and the hardest part of that acclimation came when I was young and could take it. Show me the golftanned, fifty-year-old suburban priest who will survive transplantation here - I don’t care how carefully he parcels out his multivitamins.

There is a bit of mystery to their pursuing me. There’s another Catholic missionary I know who lives up north on the banks of the Yukon, in much rougher conditions than the relatively civilized frontier life here in Bethel (which includes electricity, a hospital, even alcohol-though only by mail). This Yukon priest, he’s eighty. Maybe ninety. No one’s coming for him. And his parishioners don’t even like him, at least not as much as mine do me.

 It’s why I didn’t answer any of the letters I received. One, I’ve aged into a fine contrarian, but more important, I wanted these men to come tell me face-to-face that I needed to retire. That way, when they said, It’s because you’re getting old, I could study their eyes and see what the other reason, the real reason, is.

I have an idea.

It’s not about the man I killed, or the boy I didn’t save.

It’s not even about the woman I loved.

But the shaman—

Well. Yes. This all might have something to do with him.

3.

One whiff of No 10 and all of a sudden Corbyn wants a customs union

John Crace

What goes around, comes around. Less than a year ago, the three Labour Coventry MPs had come to the city’s university to hear Gordon Brown campaign on their behalf during the general election. Not once in the course of that hour-long event was Jeremy Corbyn mentioned. The name was considered just too toxic. Now those same three Labour MPs were back at the same university to give the Labour leader their undivided attention and support as he made his bid to become the next prime minister.

Also in the front row were the shadow international trade minister, Barry Gardiner, the shadow business secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey and the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer. They too must have had mixed feelings about Corbyn’s upcoming speech, though for very different reasons.

Gardiner because he had just spent months campaigning against the core argument Corbyn was about to make and was now going to look like a bit of a dick. Long-Bailey because she had never really held a firm opinion about anything – whatever Jeremy said was fine by her – and she was genuinely excited to find out what she would be believing next. And Starmer because he had spent months and months nudging the Labour leader toward this position and still wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t going to back out at the last minute and deliver an entirely different speech.

After a slight misfire – he initially appeared to head in the opposite direction away from the lectern positioned in front of three miniature hydrogen cars – Corbyn quickly got into gear. He still struggles with reading from an Autocue and his attempts at jokes invariably fall flat, partly because they’re not funny and partly because he isn’t sure which bits are the punchlines. “You’re supposed to laugh at that,” he said plaintively at one point, but there was at least some commitment in this speech. Certainly more than in any other Brexit speech he had ever made.

He began by calling out the Tories for being in disarray, and keeping the country in the dark about its intentions and wanting some kind of bespoke fantasy Brexit. The irony that this also perfectly described the Labour party up till now escaped him. But then opposition parties always allow themselves a little more leeway on such matters. After a bit about Labour backing a jobs-first Brexit – has any party every backed an unemployment-first Brexit? – Corbyn got to his big sell.

Britain would be staying in a customs union. Better than that, a bespoke customs union. Though obviously a very different kind of bespoke from the Tories’ bespoke. One that would not only protect the Good Friday agreement by allowing frictionless trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but would also allow Britain to do other trade deals because the EU would be happy to let us do so.

How that was going to work, he didn’t elaborate. But he was sure it was going to be OK. Not least because it put clear blue water between Labour and the Tories and would give Theresa May a major headache. Better still, he almost sounded as if he believed in the idea that only a few months ago he had been totally against. Maybe the EU wasn’t quite as bad as he had previously thought. Especially if it was going to open the door to Number 10.

Having negotiated the tricky bit of principles versus pragmatics, Corbyn moved on to his favourite subjects. Refugees and Iraq. Not that they had anything to do with Brexit, but he had insisted he be allowed to have a short rant about them in return for all the dreary EU stuff. Here we got Corbyn at his most passionate.

After fielding a few questions from the media with vaguely non-committal answers, Corbyn took a question from an activist. Could he just hurry up and become prime minister? For the first time, Corbyn truly relaxed. He was among his people and he wandered off into the crowd to pose for selfies. Starmer meanwhile breathed a sigh of relief. Corbyn had kept to the script. Labour was back in the game. Now to work on the single market. That might prove trickier, but if Corbyn could be made to smell the furniture in Number 10 he might come round. Baby steps and all that. One whiff of No 10 and all of a sudden Corbyn wants a customs union

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