utenzi

It might seem like an odd thing to be thinking about but a few days ago I had to decide if I could toss out some kitchen scraps to the chickens. Chickens love scraps so why not give them, you might ask. Well, it so happens that there was a lot of spicy heat in those scraps and I didn't want to injure their little mouth parts---or anything that comes after the mouth either. Chicken shit isn't all that nice to start with. You really don't want to make it worse. So that led to some biological research. Specifically into TRPV1, which happens to be the receptor whose main job is detection and regulation of body temperature, but which also is the capsaicin receptor. The full name, in case you're curious, is transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily V member 1. As it turns out, though dogs, mice, and humans have a strong reaction to capsaicin, other species---even though they also have the TRPV1 receptor---don't have the same response. And chickens are one of t...

Dogs are dangerous. See my lip? Torn up it is. Do you wonder how it got that way? Just take a gander at the picture below and you'll see the oaf that inflicted the injury on my person. The obvious conclusion was that I was lifting the dog, it struggled, and my mouth got struck during the fracas. But no, it wasn't like that at all. All I was doing was sitting in a chair eating my dinner and the dog tried to jump in my lap. Do you see the size of that damn thing?!? Needless to say it didn't fit and my mouth got whacked by the dog's head during the attempt to fit onto my lap. Dogs! Another interesting thing about that picture. Until I saw the picture up there I didn't realize how different the wear pattern was on my teeth. It looks like I use the teeth on one side of my mouth a lot more than the ones on the other. Odd. I'll have to pay more attention when I'm biting things and see if I can notice myself preferring one side over the other. In other matters, that...

Too bad they were cookies with a lot of cocoa in them. :-(

I went to my brother's house near Atlanta for Thanksgiving this year. They have a new dog now and it's very cute. Not very bright, I'm afraid but quite cute. As you can probably tell from these two pictures, the critter is fluffy as a cloud. When she runs after a toy it looks like there's nothing but a pile of fur flouncing across the floor. Funny as can be. In the second picture, just out of sight up top is the turkey, and there's the dog stretching as far as she can in a not-so-subtle attempt at bird raiding. Silly doggie, turkeys are for humans. I'm at loose ends for this weekend. Kim has to work so I'm on my own. I need to fix my bed---it sprung a leak two weeks ago and I decided to not fix it until after Thanksgiving since I didn't want to chance a catastrophic water bursting while I was out of town.... however it's been a week since I got back and I'm still sleeping on the sofa. Procrastination is a terrible thing. But that fix won't ta...

Sometimes you really have to wonder why dogs put up with us. I mean, is a warm place to sleep and free food worth this kind of assault on ones dignity? Oh well, Halloween is fast approaching and I guess you have to get ready ahead of time... but doesn't it seem like he's saying: Why are you doing this to me???

The weather is rainy and cold. Not the best time to be on the lake in a kayak. But not everyone was bothered by the weather...

I read an online article today by Maggie Fox, a health and science editor at Reuters. The article is about a mutation in one breed of dogs that seems to enable the dog to run much faster. Here's an excerpt from the article: A gene that helps control muscle development makes all the difference between an elite racing dog and a freak that is put down at birth, scientists reported on Tuesday. Racing whippets that carried one copy of the mutated gene were among the fastest runners, but those that carried two copies became unattractively bulky and were usually destroyed by breeders, the researchers said. The next step may be to look for this gene in human athletes to see if it helps explain what makes some competitors excel, said Dr. Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who led the study. The gene controls a muscle protein called myostatin. "Our work is the first to link athletic performance to a mutation in the myostatin gene and could have im...