Three articles this month, all of them on biology. The first one is only a scientific article in the vaguest sense and talks about the cognitive benefits to gained from travel. The second one weighs in on the age old debate of cats versus dogs and the last one concerns a recent development that could lead to superhuman strength being a reality.

The first article is less formal than the usual stuff that I link to as part of this series and frankly I didn’t think it’s a bit too long for the ideas it presents, but it does make for a rather good if somewhat obvious point: that travel expands the mind and opens us to possibilities that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred to us. What sets this observation apart is that the article cites experiments performed by psychologist Lile Jia at Indiana University. He assigned tasks to two group of students with one group told that the task was from a place far away while another group was told that the task came from somewhere nearby.

He consistently found that if the students were told the task came from a more exotic place, the students would be more creative and would be more likely to come up with solutions that fell outside of the everyday scope of their lives. Similarly, the article cites experiments performed by business schools that showed that students who had spent a significant time abroad were more likely to solve a classic psychological puzzle. The reason for all this is that the experience of being in a different land and being immersed in a different culture causes people to develop more open-mindedness, leading them to not take things for granted and to realize that there are many, and equally valid, ways of interpreting the world.

The second one isn’t much of a scientific article either but it’s very entertaining to me as a dog owner as it’s an attempt, albeit not a very serious one, to compare the whether dogs or cats make for better companions for humans. The actual scoring is silly and is obviously written in such a way as to make the contest as close as possible for maximum entertainment value but there are still enough scientific tidbits in the article to make it interesting reading. For example, it claims that cats’ brains have around 300 million neurons while dogs’ brains have around 160 million. Humans by contrast have around 100 billion neurons.

Other small bits of facts from the article:

• Dogs bond with their human master in the same way that human babies bond with their mothers. Experiments show that a 4-month old puppy will choose a human companion over another dog.
• In laboratory testing, scientists have found that dogs perform poorly at intelligence tests compared to their wild cousins, wolves. However, it was also found that dogs’ success rate at these tests improved when their human masters encouraged them. This indicates that dogs are not necessarily dumber than wolves but that they prefer to solve problems collaboratively with humans.
• Other animals such as chimps and dolphins can learn by emulation, that is watching someone do something and trying to copy it, but dogs can learn things the same way human infants can, by observing cues such as eye contact, gestures and vocalization to understand what its master is telling it to do. Cats appear to be able to learn this way too, but dogs are far more enthusiastic about learning.

Again, it’s nothing really novel, just a nice summary of interesting facts about our favorite pets.

Finally the last article is about research done at the National Children’s Hospital and Ohio State University. These scientists have discovered how to induce muscular growth in monkeys, causing them to develop much greater than normal strength. The key to this is a protein called myostatin which regulates muscle building, sending signals to stop consuming resources to grow muscles when appropriate.

Using gene therapy, the team successfully used follistan, a known myostatin blocker, to promote muscular growth in macaque monkeys. Since monkeys can’t be induced to lift weights in order to measure their physical strength, the team used electric stimulation and measured the strength of the muscle’s response. They observed that one specimen demonstrated an increase of 78% in leg strength compared to control results. What’s surprising to me that despite these drastic changes, the team could find no evidence of internal organ damage or reduced function in the reproductive cycle. Neither was there any sign of damage to tendons or ligaments due to the additional stresses placed on them.

The practical applications of this procedure are useful but fairly limited. The article mentions the possibility of using it to treat children who are born with atrophied muscles as well using it as a way to counteract the diminished muscle strength and coordination that comes with old age. But what struck me most about this piece of news is how resonantly it adheres to the call of science making humans stronger, better and faster.