Hearing shapes: the Bouba–Kiki effect in adult domestic dogs - royalsocietypublishing.org

Picture a shape called 'Bouba'. What features does it have? Is it angular, rounded, soft, hard? What about a shape called 'Kiki'? There's no correct answer to this – the words are made up. But for some strange reason, most people who are asked this question – regardless of the language or alphabet they use to speak or write – agree that Kiki is spiky, and Bouba is round. This fascinating psychological experiment was first conceived in the 1920s, and it suggests there may be something universal about the way we humans connect visual information, like shapes, with sounds. Now, a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences suggests even our canine companions might follow this trend. The shapes used in the 'bouba/kiki' experiments. (Andrew Dunn/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)Animal behaviorist Eleonora Biffi at the University of Parma in Italy led the research. She and her team recruited 70 domestic dogs to participate in two almost identical experiments. The first experiment involved 51 dogs and their owners. Each dog/owner pair entered a room set up with a screen and a speaker to the left, and another screen and speaker to the right.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.