FBI makes animals cruelty a “Class A felony”

 

Interesting development in the US last month (covered here too):

good for the few animals unlucky enough to be tortured by sociopaths, and maybe useful for spotting murderers in the making.

 

We love Reviewer Two

Just had Danielle’s paper accepted pending revision! Behavioural Brain Research is often super-fast, and this may have been a record (under 3 weeks; I wrote and edited this paper on planes, in pubs and on trains while travelling to and around the UK, submitting it the very day I submitted my NSERC, to get a precious submission number).

Some sensible suggestions from Ref 1, and what from Ref. 2?  Just this:

Ref. 2, you’re a little lazy, but we love you.

Interesting new paper in Hormones & Behavior

Experimentally administered oxytocin increased how much grooming and regurgitated blood vampires give to each other (but doesn’t affect how many partners they give these benefits too: they’re just more friendly to their friends).

We got our cat faces grant!

It’s only tiny (we decided the less we asked for, the more likely we’d get it), and comes with some odd wording about Purina needing to approve manuscripts before they’re sent to journals (which we still need to investigate: is this benign or sinister?). But still, very very nice to get a thumbs up for this work. I credit Mouse and her expressive little face.

Swedish veggie balls for Jamie

As it was Jamie‘s last day in Ontario, I drove to Toronto to meet with him, have one last catch up, and go over the thesis corrections to check we’re on the same page (as I’ll be the one who signs them off when he’s done, and he’s under a time crunch as Stanford would very much like him to be a real post-doc now).

We met at the Etobikoke Ikea as a sort of midway point: perhaps odd, but they have decent food and coffee (plus I could pick up a handy Molger). Very nice it was too. And Jamie, there was one last thing I forgot to say: WE MISS YOU!!!!!!!

Party for Jamie, Heather and Jeanette!

My students have defended three brilliant theses in the last 12 months: Jamie this week, Heather a couple of months ago, and Jeanette last Dec. (all pictured below).

Tonight we celebrated in style, with lovely vegan food (supplied by Magnolia Catering) and artful cocktails created by Mike and his wife Alyssa. (Everyone has such great partners/spouses, I may have to start interviewing boyfriends/girlfriends when I talk to new people about joining the group)

No pics of the whole group of 20 as they aways just look like this, but below: Heather, with husband Michael, and Alexandra…

.. Jeanette, with Maria‘s sister Esther…

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… and Jamie, with Mike and Walter:

Yay – congratulations! (now let’s never do that again)

It was Jamie‘s PhD defence on Thursday. Fantastic having him here from Stanford, and we had a great examining committee set up: me and Lee from his advisory committee, Trevor DeVries as the chair, Andrew McAdam as the ‘internal external’, and Sergio Pellis, a if not THE world expert on play, as the ‘real’ external.

However, the whole thing was not quite as much fun as I was expecting. First of all the video conferencing system stopped working about a minute after we started. I’ve had this crap out on me twice before, in Jeanette’s defence and Walter’s QEs — both times a miserable experience — but everyone swore blind all the problems were now fixed.

After half an hour of trying to fix it (the room full of a trapped, restless audience, pen-twiddling, impotent examiners and a restlessly pacing Jamie), we gave up and used Kate Shovellor‘s iPad (thankyou Kate!) and Skype (see below). This worked a treat, and Jamie started. His talk went really well. But he then lost his voice (he had a sore throat), and at one point also his mind (Sergio’s first killer questions left him struggling for answers: something I had never seen before, in seven years of working with Jamie). At this point if frogs had rained from the ceiling I would not have been surprised.

Luckily it picked up from there, and the final unanimous conclusions were (of course) a pass, and also that his thesis made a truly major contribution to the literature on play. Now tonight, we party!

Dwayne Miller is a fibber!

Nope, not a co-author, or anyone I even know!

Good lord (pun intended): religious kids are meaner

Fascinating new paper in Current Biology.

Iced mink

Cute pic of a mink swimming under ice – found on Sean Tamblyn’s great website on Toronto Island wildlife. (This is the photographer who a while ago I paid a very modest fee to, to use his lovely, bounding “mink sprint” picture).