The glass RNA factory

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a discovery that has startling (and encouraging) implications for the search for extraterrestrial life -- that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are so easy to form abiotically that they are common even in interstellar dust clouds.

Well, because of my twin-brudda-from-anudda-mudda, the wonderful writer and blogger Andrew Butters, I found out that a new bit of research has shown that another piece of biochemistry -- RNA -- is equally easy to make in large quantities.

If anything, this is even more exciting to us aliens-in-space aficionados than the amino acid research was, because the model for the origins of life on Earth that is now virtually universally accepted is called "RNA world."  The idea has been around since the early 1960s, and simply put, it's that the first nucleic acid type to form in the early oceans was not DNA, but RNA.  At first this model met with considerable skepticism.  One common criticism was that the only organisms that encode their genome as RNA are certain viruses (such as the common cold, flu, rabies, mumps, measles, hepatitis, and COVID-19); all other organisms encode their genomes as DNA.  The second is that RNA has a tendency to be unstable.  It's a single helix; the shape resembles a spiral with short spokes sticking out at angles along its length, and that open shape allows it to be attacked and broken down readily by solvents (including water).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DataBase Center for Life Science (DBCLS), 201904 RNA, CC BY 4.0]

Two subsequent discoveries tilted biochemists toward accepting the RNA world model.  First, it was found that there are stable forms of RNA, such as transfer RNA, that are able to protect themselves from breakdown by having "hairpin loops" -- places where the helix doubles back and bonds to itself through complementary base-pairing, just like DNA has.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Vossman, Pre-mRNA-1ysv-tubes, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The second discovery was that RNA is autocatalytic -- pieces of RNA can actually feed back and speed up the reactions that form more RNA.  DNA doesn't do this, which was a major stumbling block to figuring out how the first self-replicating DNA formed.

So most folks are convinced that RNA was the first genetic material, and that it was only superseded by DNA after first double-stranded RNA formed, and then there was a chemical alteration of the sugar in the backbone (deoxyribose for ribose) and one of the nitrogenous bases (thymine for uracil).  But this only shoved the basic problem back one step.  Okay, RNA came before DNA; but what made the RNA?

We've known for ages, because of the stupendous Miller-Urey experiment, that making nucleotides -- the building blocks of both RNA and DNA -- is easy in the abiotic conditions that existed on the early Earth.  But how did link together into the long chains that form the structure of all functional RNA?

The new research indicates that it's amazingly simple -- all you have to do is to take the solution of nucleotides, and allow it to percolate through the pores of one of the most common rocks on Earth -- basaltic volcanic glass.

This stuff is kind of everywhere.  Not only is ninety percent of all volcanic rock on Earth made of basalt, it's also common on the two other rocky worlds we've studied -- the Moon and Mars.  "Basaltic glass was everywhere on Earth at the time," said Stephen Mojzsis, of the Budapest Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, who co-authored the study.  "For several hundred million years after the Moon formed, frequent impacts coupled with abundant volcanism on the young planet formed molten basaltic lava, the source of the basalt glass.  Impacts also evaporated water to give dry land, providing aquifers where RNA could have formed."

Basalt also contains two ions that the team showed were critical for forming the RNA nucleotides and then linking them together -- nickel and boron.  The experiments they ran showed that all you had to do was pour the nucleotide slurry over the basaltic glass, and wait -- and voilà, in a day or two you had 100- to 200-subunit-long chains of RNA that look exactly like the kind you find in living things.

Given basalt's ubiquity on rocky planets, this makes it even more likely that there is life elsewhere in the universe, and that its biochemistry might have some striking overlap with ours.  Exciting stuff.

So it looks like the quote from the wonderful movie Contact might well turn out to be prescient.  "The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space."

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Runes in Maine

Ready for a convoluted story?

Today's journey is about the twistiest trip through mythology, fakery, and pseudohistory I have ever seen, linking the Vikings, the Templars, first century Judaea, and a farm in Maine.  It's the story of the Spirit Pond runestones, an alleged pre-Columbian runic inscription that one guy thinks proves that the Native Americans of the northeastern United States are direct descendants of Jesus Christ.

So pop yourself some popcorn, sit back, and let me tell you a tall tale.

In 1971, Walter Elliott, a carpenter from Phippsburg, Maine, claimed that he had found a stone with some odd inscriptions near a place called Spirit Pond. The inscriptions, he said, looked like Norse runes, so could this possibly be proof that the Norse explorers of the eleventh century, especially Leif Eiríksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, had made their way to New England?

Part of the inscription on the Spirit Pond runestone [Image is in the Public Domain]

The claim came to the attention of Einar Haugen, Harvard University professor of linguistics, and one of the world's experts on Norse runes.  Haugen pronounced the inscription a fake, claiming that the inscription has "a few Norse words in a sea of gibberish."  Specifically, he said that the use of the "hooked X" or "stung A" character (it can be seen in the top right word above, the second character from the right) was inconsistent with verified eleventh century Norse inscriptions, and in fact was eerily similar to the inscription on the Kensington runestone, found in Minnesota in 1898, which is universally considered to be a modern fake.

Pretty decisive, no?  But as we've seen over and over, a silly old Ph.D. and professorship in a subject doesn't mean that amateurs can't know more.  So the Spirit Pond stone has gained quite a following amongst the Vikings-in-the-Americas crowd.

And as we've also seen, there is no wild theory that can't be made even more bizarre.

Enter geologist Scott Wolter.  Wolter thinks that the Spirit Pond runestone is a genuine archaeological find, but it doesn't mean what its finder claimed -- that it was proof that Eiríksson, Karlsefni, et al. had made it to North America in the eleventh century.  He claims that it was brought to what is now Maine in the fourteenth century...

... by the Knights Templar.

Yes, the Knights Templar, that fertile source of speculation for aficionados of secret societies, which was forcefully disbanded in 1314 and has spawned wacky conspiracy theories ever since.  The Templars ran afoul of the powers-that-be, especially Pope Clement V and King Philip IV of France, mostly because of their money, power, and influence, and Clement and Philip had the leaders arrested on trumped-up charges of sorcery.  (To be fair, some of their rituals were pretty bizarre.)  Templars who weren't willing to confess -- and this included their head, Jacques de Molay -- were burned at the stake.

So, so much for the Templars.  Except for the aforementioned conspiracy theories, of course, which suggest that the main body of the Templars escaped, letting de Molay take the fall (some say de Molay willingly sacrificed himself to let the others get away).  But the question remained; get away to where?

Scott Wolter has the answer.

To Maine, of course.

So they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to Maine, bringing along Cistercian monks who (for some reason) wrote in Norse runes, and the monks inscribed the Spirit Pond stone.  And Wolter says he knows what the runic inscription means.  Haugen, and other so-called experts, are wrong to say it's gibberish.  The Spirit Pond stone is an incredibly important artifact because it tells how the Templars came to North America, bringing with them the Holy Grail.

And you thought that its final resting place was the "Castle Arrrrggggghhh."

But that's another mistake people make, Wolter said.  The "San Gréal" -- Holy Grail -- is actually a mistranscription of "Sang Réal" -- meaning "royal blood."  In other words, the bloodline of Jesus.  Which means that the Templars were Jesus's direct descendants.  So they arrived in Maine, carrying the Sang Réal, and proceeded to have lots of sex with Native women (apparently ignoring the Templars' compulsory vow of celibacy), meaning that the Native inhabitants of eastern North America are descended from Jesus Christ.

All of this is just jolly news for me, because I am descended through my mom from various members of the Micmac and Maliseet tribes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  So here's yet another branch I can add to my family tree.

Of course, the linguistic world isn't paying this much attention, which pisses Wolter right off.  "These archaeologists have all been programmed [to believe the stones are fakes] and they can’t think outside the box," he said.

Well, sorry, Mr. Wolter.  "Decades of scholarly study" does not equal being "programmed," it equals "knowing what the fuck you're talking about."  Haugen's work in the field of Norse linguistics is the epitome of careful research and thorough study.  So I'm not ready to jettison his expertise because you'd like the northeastern Natives to be Jesus's great-great-great (etc.) grandchildren.

And as far as I can tell, Wolter seems to be thinking so far outside the box that from where he's standing, he couldn't even see the box with a powerful telescope.

In any case, I hope you've enjoyed today's journey through time.  It's not bad as fiction; kind of the bastard child of The DaVinci Code and Foucault's Pendulum.  But as a real historical claim, it's a bit of a non-starter.

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A fish out of water

A lot of us probably have moments in our education where the teacher showed us something that overturned some piece of how we saw the universe.  I can remember several:

• Finding out in physics class that horizontal and vertical motion are entirely independent of each other -- so if you shoot a bullet from a gun horizontally, and at the same moment drop a bullet from the height of the gun barrel, both will hit the ground at the same time.
• Learning that chemical reactions completely change substances' properties; for example, if you take sodium (a soft, silvery metal) and react it with chlorine (a yellow-green, highly toxic gas) you get table salt.
• Seeing in math class that there are different kinds of infinity -- countable and uncountable -- and the uncountable kinds are way bigger.  Infinitely bigger, in fact.  (If you want to find out more about how this was figured out, and also learn about some other mind-blowing stuff about math, check out my post on bizarre mathematics from a couple of years ago.)
• Learning in astronomy class that because light travels at a finite speed, any time you are looking at something, you're seeing what it looked like when light left its surface.  So you never see anything in the present -- you see everything as it was in the past.  And the farther it is away from you, the further into the past you're looking.

Another one came up in my high school biology class, during the unit that was to launch me on a life-long fascination: evolution.  Ms. Miller, our bio teacher, told us that all tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) came from a common ancestor, and the way we know this is that regardless of the limb function, they all have the same number and arrangement of bones.  Your arm has one upper arm bone (humerus), two lower arm bones (radius and ulna), seven wrist bones (carpals), five hand bones (metacarpals), and fourteen finger bones (phalanges).  But... so does a whale's flipper, a dog's front leg, a bat's wing, and a lizard's leg.  The sizes differ, but the bones are the same.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I've never found a single creationist or intelligent design advocate who could give me a cogent explanation of why an omnipotent creator would give a whale articulated finger bones and then encase them in a solid flipper.

In any case, I found the idea boggling; that we have the arm and hand bones we do because we inherited the basic structure from an ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago -- and share that same structure, and that same ancestor, with all other four-limbed vertebrates.  And just a couple of weeks ago, a team led by Shigeru Kuratani of the Evolutionary Morphology Laboratory at the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research in Japan, have found a good candidate for what exactly that common ancestor might be.

Called Palaeospondylus, the great-great (etc.) grandparents of all tetrapods was a fish-like animal, only about five centimeters long.  It swam around in the warm seas of the Devonian Period on the order of four hundred million years ago, so preceded the previous candidate (Tiktaalik) by a good twenty-five million years.

A reconstruction of Palaeospondylus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smokeybjb, Palaeospondylus, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The tipoff that this was the common ancestor of tetrapods had nothing to do with limbs, but with the ear morphology -- they had three semicircular canals, organs critical in balance and equilibrium, just like we do -- and some details of cranial anatomy.  "The strange morphology of Palaeospondylus, which is comparable to that of tetrapod larvae, is very interesting from a developmental genetic point of view," said Tatsuya Hirasawa, who co-authored the study.  "Taking this into consideration, we will continue to study the developmental genetics that brought about this and other morphological changes that occurred at the water-to-land transition in vertebrate history."

I don't know how anyone could think about this -- that a little fish found fossilized in a limestone bed in Scotland might be the last common ancestor between humans, bats, lizards, and salamanders -- and not be at least a little bit amazed.  It brings home what to me is one of the most wonderful things about the evolutionary model; that all life on Earth is connected, not only ecologically, but genetically.  You're a distant cousin to all other terrestrial species, however different they may look from you.

And if learning that doesn't alter your view of the universe, I don't know what would.

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Out of the ashes

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C. E. and its destruction of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum make for a story that is as fascinating as it is horrific.

Vesuvius is a stratovolcano, built up from layer after layer of hardened lava (the "strata" of the name).  Stratovolcanoes usually produce felsic lava -- high in silica content -- making the molten rock thick, viscous, and resistant to flowing.  The results are explosive eruptions, not the cascading rivers of lava you see in shield volcanoes such as Kilauea, which produce mafic lava that is low in silica and flows readily.

The eruption of a stratovolcano is catastrophic.  Unlike the Hawaiian shield volcanoes, which certainly can cause significant property damage but seldom loss of life, stratovolcanoes fling chunks of rock around, generate huge amounts of ash, and -- worst of all -- can create pyroclastic flows of superheated air that can move at a hundred kilometers per hour and incinerate everything in their path.  It was a pyroclastic flow from Mount Pelée that killed almost thirty thousand people in only a few minutes on the island of Martinique in 1902; one of three people in the city of Saint Pierre who are known to have survived only did because he was being held in an underground jail cell.

The combination of rock ejection, ash clouds, and pyroclastic flows are sometimes called Plinian eruptions after the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who died during the eruption of Vesuvius.  If you don't mind being a little freaked out by the power of nature, check out this ten-minute video simulation of the 79 C. E. eruption, from the perspective of a person in Pompeii:

The reason the topic comes up is because of a paper that appeared last week in Scientific Reports about some research done by a team led by Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Copenhagen.  Scorrano and his team found two human skeletons, one male and one female, that -- despite being covered by scorching-hot ash and then entombed for almost two thousand years -- contained enough intact DNA to analyze.

The man's, in fact, was complete enough to do a whole-genome analysis, including a Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA study.  The results were interesting, if not surprising; his DNA was similar to that of modern Italians from the region, although both his Y DNA and mtDNA showed markers most commonly found on the island of Sardinia.  

So he likely had ancestry on both sides of his family from Sardinia.  He also, apparently, had tuberculosis.  The woman's skeleton, which contained only fragmentary DNA, showed signs of significant osteoarthritis.  Serena Viva of the University of Salento, who co-authored the study, said, "This could have been the reason for which they waited for it all to finish, maybe in the security of their home, compared to other victims who were fleeing and whose remains were found in open spaces."

The ruins of Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the background [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ElfQrin, Theathres of Pompeii, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Scary stuff, that.  I have to say I'm glad I don't live in Naples; I wouldn't be able to sleep with Vesuvius looming over me, even though it's shown no signs of an imminent catastrophic eruption.  I actually thought the same thing when we were in the Pacific Northwest last week, not only because of nearby stratovolcanoes like Mount Rainier, but because the entire area is at risk of enormous earthquakes because of plate movement along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. 

I know the risk during any given week is extremely low, but it did make me a bit nervous anyhow.  Sometimes a little knowledge can be a lot scary.

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Islands in the sky

About fifteen years ago, I fulfilled a lifelong dream to go to Ecuador, a country I've been fascinated with since I was a kid.  I'm a fanatical birder, and that tiny country is home to no less than one-sixth of the world's nine-thousand-odd bird species, including over three hundred different kinds of hummingbirds.  (Where I live, in upstate New York, we have exactly one, and it's only here in the summer.)

It was when I was reading up on the hummingbirds in the Ecuadorian bird guide before leaving on the trip that I noticed something odd.  A number of the species had extremely narrow ranges.  A good example is the exquisite Violet-tailed Sylph (Aglaiocercus coelestis):

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joseph C Boone, Violet-tailed Sylph 2 JCB, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Violet-tailed Sylph is only found in a narrow band a couple of kilometers wide on the Pacific slope of the Andes.  North-to-south, though, its range spans over sixteen hundred kilometers.  The reason for this bizarre geographical distribution is obvious if you consider the topography; the range of the Violet-tailed Sylph, and the majority of the other hummingbirds, is driven by altitude, so their ranges run in thin strips parallel to the Andes Mountains.  A lot of it has to do with food specialization; they're nectar-feeders, and many of them have bills shaped to fit only a single species of flower.  Many tropical plants are very temperature- and moisture-sensitive, and that depends strongly on altitude, so they have equally restricted ranges.  In the case of the lovely little Sylph, its food sources are mostly found in the cloud forests that run along the mid-slope of the Andes at an elevation of about a thousand meters.

The combination of phenomenal overall biodiversity with extremely narrow ranges that you find in Ecuador draws some parallels with the fascinating ecological model called island biogeography studied in the 1960s by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson.  They were trying to find patterns to explain why some islands (such as Trinidad) have extensive and diverse ecosystems, and others (such as Tristan da Cunha) have very low diversity.  They found two factors that made the most difference; island size and the proximity of the island to the nearest mainland.

The dependence on island size is easy to see; the bigger the island, the more resources there are, and the greater the number of species it can support.  The proximity factor comes from the likelihood of immigration (defined as a new species arriving and becoming established); more distant islands are farther away from a source of new species.  The math gets a little complicated, but the basic gist is that islands end up in an equilibrium between immigration and extinction, and that equilibrium results in a predictably higher number of species on larger islands that are closer to the mainland.

Where this gets interesting is that the mathematical model even works for metaphorical islands -- marshes surrounded by desert, isolated springs and lakes, hydrothermal vents on the floor of the deep ocean, and -- as with our hummingbird -- narrow ecosystems in mountain ranges that are restricted by altitude.  In fact, it's this last one that got me thinking about this topic in the first place; last week, a really cool study by a team led by Martha Kandziora of Charles University (Prague) looked at diversity in African "sky islands," ecosystems high up on mountains that are defined by cold temperatures, low rainfall, and harsh sunlight.  The authors write:

Tropical alpine floras are renowned for high endemism, spectacular giant rosette plants testifying to convergent adaptation to harsh climates with nightly frosts, and recruitment dominated by long-distance dispersal from remote areas.  In contrast to the larger, more recent (late Miocene onward) and contiguous expanses of tropical alpine habitat in South America, the tropical alpine flora in Africa is extremely fragmented across small patches on distant mountains of variable age (Oligocene onward)...  Although some of the mountains are old... most lineages appear to have colonized the afroalpine during the last 5 or 10 My.  The accumulation of species increased exponentially toward the present.  Taken together with recent reports of extremely low intrapopulation genetic diversity and recent intermountain population divergence, this points to a young, unsaturated, and dynamic island scenario.  Habitat disturbance caused by the Pleistocene climate oscillations likely induced cycles of colonization, speciation, extinction, and recolonization.

One of the things driving the study is that these regions are seriously threatened by anthropogenic climate change.  While species like the Violet-tailed Sylph could potentially respond to warming trends by moving farther up-slope, the African sky islands have nowhere to go.  If the climate gets significantly hotter, the great likelihood is that these ecosystems with their unique and bizarre flora will simply disappear.

Tragic to think that we're losing biodiversity and in many cases only poorly understand what's being lost.  Perhaps these odd species with their extreme specialization and tiny ranges don't have much impact on our day-to-day lives, but without them, we would live in a sadly impoverished world.

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Steve, Steve, Jennifer, and Onesimus

I remember running into the idea of changing trends in name popularity when I saw a New Yorker comic back in the seventies.  It showed a typical first grade class photo, including the teacher, and the caption said, "Top row: Steve, Steve, Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve.  Middle row: Jennifer, Steve, Jennifer, Steve, and Steve.  Bottom row: Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve, Steve, Jennifer, and Mrs. Bertha Q. Wackenhorst."

Interestingly, as that particular trend goes, during my last ten years of teaching, I had only a handful of Jennifers in my classes, and barely any Steves.  But I bumped into a more recent iteration of the same phenomenon with a photo of five handsome, affluent-looking white college guys, all smiles and tans and perfect hair.  The caption read, "Left to right: Hayden, Trayden, Kayden, Grayden, and Brayden."

In my own case, I was named after my father, but he was named by his mom, who allegedly said -- and having known her well, I can easily hear her saying it -- "He may be stuck with a French last name, but he damn sure is going to have a Scottish first name!"  Which is how I ended up with an odd amalgam that is still strangely fitting of my actual roots.

Things get even more complicated when you start throwing in other languages.

Names come and go, something that really became apparent when I started doing research into genealogy.  Various relatives and ancestors from my family tree include Ulysse, Anicet, Roxzella, Orsa, Laodice, Odressi, Donathilde, and Hiram.  A friend of mine, for whom I did some genealogical digging, descends from a guy named Onesimus Futch, which sounds like an insult.  ("How dare you, you onesimus futch!")  

My wife's family is largely Eastern European Jewish, and she has Avish, Baruch, Gittel, Scholem, Chaia, Dvora, and Mordechai.  The really weird ones, though, are in my wife's non-Jewish ancestry, which hailed from England and goes back to the Anglo-Norman nobility.  She has an ancestor named, I kid you not, Marmaduke de Thweng.  Another was Johanna Ufflete.  But by far my favorite is Benedicta de Shelving, which would make a great name for the patron saint of interior decorators.

Always keep in mind that however strange your name is, it could be worse.

The topic comes up because of some recent research out of the University of Michigan which looked at naming trends both in children and in pets, and found that it could be modeled using a concept from evolutionary genetics called frequency-dependent selection.  The idea here is that the success of a specific phenotype -- and thus its trending toward becoming more or less common -- depends on how common it already is.  It can go either way; in positive frequency dependence, the trait has better success the more common it is.  (A good example is warning coloration, where a poisonous or venomous species advertises its presence with bright colors; the tactic only works if there are enough dangerous, brightly-colored individuals that predators learn to leave them alone.)  There's also negative frequency dependence, where the success of common phenotypes is poorer.  (An example is apostatic selection in a species of common British garden snails that have a variety of color patterns; studies showed that predators favored the more familiar-looking ones, so rare color patterns had a better survival rate.)

Naming trends tended to show a negative frequency dependence; when names become common, new parents (or new pet owners) tend to choose something more distinctive (or else spell it differently, which is why I had students named Michaela, Mikayla, Mikaela, Makayla, and Mekayla, fortunately not all in the same class).  Names become trendy for a while, but following the time-honored principle of "I want to be unique, just like everyone else," if the trend peaks too high, it goes into an equally precipitous fall.

"This is really a case study showing how boom-bust cycles by themselves can disfavor common types and promote diversity," said study co-author Mitchell Newberry.  "If people are always thirsting after the newest thing, then it's going to create a lot of new things.  Every time a new thing is created, it's promoted, and so more rare things rise to higher frequency and you have more diversity in the population."

Still, something that is too odd never does catch on.  I've seen the name Trasimond in nineteenth century Cajun French records, but I've never known one in real life, and that particular name seems to have always been a bit of an outlier.

You have to admit, though, that it's kind of euphonious.  Better than Onesimus Futch, anyhow, not to mention the unfortunate Mr. Zopittybop-Bop-Bop.  Given those as choices, I'll stick with Gordon.  I might even stick with Marmaduke de Thweng.  At least that one has a certain insouciance.

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Talking to the animals

We just got back from a week-long trip to visit friends in Seattle, which meant boarding our two dogs with a local kennel.  We know and trust them -- we've used them for years -- and they love our dogs, quirks and all.  So we can leave them and be sure that they're in good hands.

Guinness, for the most part, has no problem with kenneling.  He knows he's going to get treats and play time, so for him it's kind of like sleep-away summer camp.  He jumps right into the car like it's going to be a great big adventure.

Cleo, on the other hand.

Our little Shiba Inu rescue was caged during much of her four years with an abusive breeder, and she has an absolute terror of being locked up.  She's relaxed considerably since we got her in December of 2021 -- especially once we installed a dog door so she can go in and out of our big fenced back yard whenever she wants -- but she still freaks out when the door closes behind her.  And she gets very, very wary when she knows we're going to pick her up and put her in the car (for example, on trips to the vet).  She's really snuggly and friendly if it's on her terms -- but if she knows she's going to be restrained, good freakin' luck.

Cleo in a calm moment

So we've tried everything we can think of to (1) lower the stress surrounding the situation, and (2) make it easier to get her when we absolutely have to.  Bribing her with food barely works; she's the least food-motivated dog I've ever met.  Calm talk has zero effect.  And my wife pointed out to me that my tightly-wound personality comes through in my voice, that if I say in as friendly and non-threatening a manner as I can, "Hey, Cleo, c'm'ere!  Want some cheese?" she not only isn't gonna respond to the bribe, she knows that I'm up to something.

I've tried whatever I can, but I don't seem to be able to help having it show when I'm anxious about something, like when we have to drop the dogs off at the kennel by 9 AM, and it's 8:45, and we're chasing Cleo all around the back yard.  At first, I was a little reluctant to believe that Cleo is really that sensitive to subtleties in my tone of voice, but after a few frustrating hour-long battles to come closer to her than ten feet, I have to admit Carol's got a point.

And some research out of the University of Copenhagen that appeared last week in the journal BMC - Biology bears out her contention that domestic animals are way better at picking up on vocal tone than anyone thought.  It's an odd claim, when you think about it; why should domesticated animals -- even ones like dogs, who have been in association with humans for tens of thousands of years -- recognize human social signals?  Even between closely-related primate species, the same signal can mean entirely different things.  For example, smiling is a sign of friendliness amongst humans, but smiling to a chimp is basically baring the teeth, and is considered an indicator of aggression or fear.

But the research seems unequivocal.  And they weren't even working with dogs; they primarily worked with pigs and horses.  They even controlled for the possibility that animals might learn certain words and have associations (positive or negative) that come along with them, something that is certainly true of most dogs.  (Say "do you want to play fetch?" to Guinness and he immediately turns into the canine ping-pong ball.)  What the researchers did was to hire a trained actor and gave him various gibberish phrases, with the instruction to speak them in a variety of differing tones.  They then recorded the animals' reactions on a lot of benchmarks -- ear position, facial tension, pupil dilation, and so on.

The animals had no problem picking up on the actor's emotional tone.  "Our results show that these animals are affected by the emotions we charge our voices with when we speak to or are around them," said Elodie Briefer, who co-authored the study.  "They react more strongly -- generally faster -- when they are met with a negatively charged voice, compared to having a positively charged voice played to them first.  In certain situations, they even seem to mirror the emotion to which they are exposed."

So Carol, apparently, is spot-on about Cleo picking up the tension in my voice.  The open question is what I can do about it.  Even when I'm aware of it and trying to moderate it, it apparently comes through loud and clear.  At least this is the last time for a while that we're going to kennel them, she doesn't have any upcoming vet appointments, and maybe just time and trust-building will convince her that whatever happens, she's safe.

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