Surfing through the internet, I ran across some really interesting facts about dogs. As I have had more than a few dogs and know a lot of canine lovers, I thought i'd share these facts:

1. The sultry "dog days of summer" get their name from ancient astronomers who noticed that those days coincide with the period when Sirius, the Dog Star, rises at the same time as the sun. Bark, bark. Woof.

2. Bad astronomy: Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, but it is only one 10-billionth as bright as the sun and has absolutely no effect on our weather.

3. Dog nerds: Fido will touch his nose to a computer screen if it has a picture of a dog on it, but not if it shows a landscape, University of Vienna researchers have found.

4. Austrian scientists have also demonstrated that a dog seems to feel "inequity aversion" when another dog gets a better treat as a reward. The envious dog acts stand-offish, like a pouting 3-year old.

5. South Korean scientists cloned four beagle puppies with a gene that produces a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light. (The red color is visible in the pups' bellies and nails even under normal light, but don't glow like an Oak Ridge, TN dump dog.)

6. BioArts, a California company, recently closed its dog-cloning business. One reason: The market was too small. Maybe they should have offered a Day-Glo option.

7. Bad Ink Job: "unpredictable results," according to BioArts, was another reason for their demise. In one case, the clone of a blackand-white dog came out looking greenish yellow. It's not nice to fool Mother nature.

8. The worldwide dog population is an estimated 400 million, or roughly the human population of the U.S. and Mexico combined.

9. In the case of "they really do look like their owners," a study conducted at England's Bath Spa University, people matching photos of dog owners and dogs chose the right breed (out of three) more than half the time. Haven't these folks seen Creature Comforts (a British clay-mation series)?

10. Half of all owners allow their dogs to lick them on the face, but only 10% share E. coli strains with their pets. The real factor in germ transmission may be whether an owner washes his hands after playing fetch.

11. Fighting a hangover by drinking "the hair of the dog that bit you" may have originated in an ancient belief that ingesting the hair of a dog that literally bit you could guard against infection. Eeeeewww.

12. A 2006 study showed that household dogs with minimal training can smell earlyand late-stage lung and breast cancers. Swedish oncologists also found that dogs can distinguish among types of ovarian cancer.

13. A dog's nose has roughly 220 million olfactory receptors, 40 times as many as humans have. Bloodhounds have the most.

14. Penn State engineers are trying to design an artificial sniffer based on the fluid mechanics and odorant transport of the canine nose.

15. Dogs can hear frequencies up to 45,000 Hz, about twice as high as humans can. But they're not the champs: porpoises can hear up to 150,000 Hz.

16. A team led by UCLA biologists concluded that small dogs descended from Middle Eastern gray wolves more than 12,000 years ago. The connection was traced through a growth-factor gene mutation not seen in larger dogs.

17. Much older canid (dog) remains have been found in Germany, Russia, and Belgium, dating as far back as 31,000 years.

18. The reference genome for doggie DNA studies is the boxer, a breed that has an unusually high degree of genetic uniformity.

19. So that's why schnauzers look like Groucho: According to scientists at the National Human Genome Research Institute, an alteration in one gene, RSPO2, gives dogs wiry eyebrows and mustaches.

20. A variant of another gene, FGF5, produces long, silky coats, and curly hair comes from a mutation in KRT71. All three variants produce a coat like that of the Portuguese water dog adopted by the First Family.

Source:www.discoverymagazine/2010

")