Why the sheep were taught to know Barack Obama! –

Maybe you taught your dog to sit or you taught your cat to respond to its name.

But that pales in comparison to some of the skills other animals have learned to improve human health.

Recently, Good Health revealed how scientists trained bees to play football as part of their work to help us understand how human memory works.

The bees had to move a ball over a target for which they received a reward (a drop of nectar); In this way, the bees learned to memorize the skill.

But they’re not the only intelligent creatures trained to perform tasks that ultimately help our health…

Cancer smelling ants

In March, French researchers published a study in the journal iScience showing that they trained ants to detect cancer cells.

“Cells are like little factories: they need fuel and produce waste. Ants have an impressive sense of smell and are able to detect certain wastes of cancer cells,” said Professor Baptiste Piqueret, an animal behavior researcher and lead author of the study.

The ants were trained by placing a sample of human sick ovarian cancer cells in a room with a sugar solution next to it.

While the ants were drinking the sugar solution, they smelled the cancer cells and began to associate this smell with the reward.

“You will not see ants in hospitals yet, because the future of this method is to use urine or sweat, not cells – we expect you to one day give your doctor a sample and it will be presented to trained ants who react to it,” says Professor Piqueret of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany.

While dogs are trained to detect Covid-19 infection and can alert their owners of impending drops in blood sugar levels or seizures, “ants learn much faster, in minutes rather than months,” says Professor Piqueret.

Recently, Good Health revealed how scientists trained bees to play soccer as part of their work to help us understand how human memory works.

Mice behind the wheel

Behavioral neuroscientist Professor Kelly Lambert of the University of Richmond in Virginia, USA, taught mice to drive miniature cars.

In the experiment, the animals drove by pushing sticks that moved them left and right: the goal was to learn how to use the cart for snacks.

“We’ve recently stopped empowering them with gifts, and they continue to travel by car, so they seem to like it,” says Professor Lambert.

The findings may help us examine how changes in movement or spatial skills occur with age.

Behavioral neuroscientist Professor Kelly Lambert from the University of Richmond, Virginia, USA, taught rats to drive miniature cars.

remember the sheep

A study published in 2017 in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that sheep can be trained to recognize faces.

To train them, the sheep were rewarded when they chose the face of a celebrity, including Barack Obama and Emma Watson, from two photos. Hopefully, studying things like how sheep’s ability to recognize faces changes over time can help us understand the cognitive effects of conditions like Huntington’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers used sheep because they live relatively long — ten to 12 years on average — whose brains are as complex as ours, and “what’s important is that there are at least 16 genetic diseases caused by the same gene in sheep as in humans. Including Huntington’s disease,” Cambridge said. Co-author Jenny Morton, a professor of neurobiology at the University of

“It’s very difficult to measure cognitive decline in humans under these conditions, but this study gives us a way to monitor how abilities change.”

A study published in 2017 in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that sheep can be trained to recognize faces. To train them, the sheep were rewarded when they chose the face of a celebrity, including Barack Obama and Emma Watson, from two photos.

pathological pigeons

In 2015, a team from the University of Iowa in the United States taught a group of pigeons to distinguish cancerous breast tissue from benign tissue on a mammogram – and in 2020 the same team published a paper in the journal Learning & Behavior. He explained how five pigeons learned to detect abnormal heart scans.

Research has shown that pigeons can organize objects into groups, and the team wondered if they could also read medical scans.

The test they look at, a myocardial perfusion SPECT test, measures how well blood is flowing through the heart muscle. A traceable agent is injected into a vein. Healthy tissue absorbs the tracer, damaged tissue does not, and this shows up with different colors on the scan. Pigeons were shown scans and learned to peck two buttons: normal or abnormal. If they made the right choice, they have to eat.

Over time, they learned what was different about the photos and chose the right photo 80 to 85% of the time – the same speed at which trained people could read scans correctly.

However, when tested with black and white photographs, the pigeons could not distinguish the images.

This discovery is also useful. “The medical imaging community is constantly evaluating whether and what colors to use to convey this type of information, and this study has shown that adding color helps a lot,” said Iowa. Associate researcher at Cardiff University.

“This was never to replace the human experts doing the diagnostic work, but to use pigeons as a way to evaluate new imaging techniques.”

sedentary dogs

A team from Emory University in Atlanta trained dogs to lie in MRI scanners; it’s a process that requires them to be too still to draw them. This provides a non-invasive way to see how their brains are working.

An MRI provides a view of the inside of the body. It’s not painful, but it’s noisy, so the dogs were given hearing protection and the team trained the dogs to get used to the noise by playing with them in the MRI room.

While its primary use is to study canine behavior, a 2017 study found an application for human health in trying to figure out which particular animals might make good service dogs.

These dogs should be calm and harmonious. Breeds like the Labrador are ideal, but even then 70 percent won’t make it.

In their study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers found that dogs who had more activity in the part of the brain that controls excitability, called the amygdala, were more likely to fail when given a treatment.

The process could one day be used by charities that train guide dogs to save time and money.