What’s up, dog?

SPECIALLY trained dogs may prove to be a diabetic’s best friend, according to a new American initiative. Mark Ruefenacht, a forensic scientist, has created a centre for teaching dogs when to alert their owners that their blood-glucose levels are going dangerously awry.

Diabetes Forecast, the journal of the American Diabetes Association, reports that canine graduates from Ruefenacht’s California-based hypoglycaemia-alert dog training centre are already proving their worth.

Scientists are unsure how the dogs can tell that human beings’ blood-sugar is plummeting, but studies have shown that high concentrations of certain volatile organic compounds in the breath can correlate with disease. Esters – chemicals with the odour of pear drops – and acetone have been detected in relation to diabetes, so trained dogs may perhaps be able to sniff out trouble and then bark a warning.

One alert-dog owner, Donna Cope, whose child has diabetes, says: “The first time the dog gets you up in the middle of the night because your daughter is dropping into a serious low, you realise it’s worth every penny that you spent buying it.”

For non-dog-loving diabetics, another new development may bring help. It’s an electromagnetic sensor that offers a noninvasive alternative to reading blood-glucose levels from daily fingerprick tests.

Dr Randall Jean, an engineering scientist at Baylor University, Texas, explains that the sensor uses electromagnetic waves to measure blood-glucose in the body. As the energy goes from the sensor through the skin and back to the sensor, the glucose level changes the waves’ characteristics. To measure glucose levels, users simply press their thumb against the sensor.

A new study by Baylor researchers on blood samples of 20 people indicates that the sensor has the potential of achieving the same or even better accuracy than current pinprick sensors. It’s clever – but not clever enough to roll over, beg or fetch sticks as well.

Husband training

IF TRAINED DOGS can help with diabetes, perhaps dolphin training can help husbands to be better spouses, says a new book. Amy Sutherland decided to use training techniques taught by America’s Shamu wildlife park on her spouse. “Nagging only made his behaviour worse,” she says.

Her book, What Shamu Taught Me About Love, Life and Marriage is published this week and a film is planned. So watch out, boys. Her tips include to reward behaviour you like and ignore behaviour you don’t: “You don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on its nose by nagging. The same goes for the husband.”

She began thanking her spouse if he threw one dirty shirt into the laundry basket. “If he threw in two, I’d kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word.”

Trainers call these responses “approximations”, rewarding the small steps towards learning a whole new behaviour. “You can’t expect a dolphin to learn to flip on command in one session,” Sutherland says. “You can’t expect a husband to start regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock.”

Strong emulsions

PERNOD clouds may be a key to better drugs, report Dutch scientists. The clouds, caused by adding Pernod to water, are a uniquely stable emulsion that can last for months. By imitating them, we could make far more stable medicines. The challenge is that no one has worked out how the “Ouzo effect” works, reports the chemists’ journal Langmuir.

Breast strokes

ANOTHER good reason to have a mammogram: it may help to predict your risk of stroke, say Missouri University scientists. By studing 793 mammograms, they found that women whose scans show calcifications had a 40 per cent higher chance of developing a stroke. Calcifications, benign mineral deposits, may offer a new diagnostic tool, the scientists told the American Stroke Association conference.

Stop copying me

BRING back office cubicles, say Canadian researchers, who have found that working next to somebody who is performing another task makes us work more slowly.

The study of office work, led by Dr Tim Welsh of Calgary University, indicates that when we work with someone else in our field of vision, we track their behaviour subconsciously and mimic it. Human beings are the most finely imitative species on the planet: precisely learning clever tricks from each other has enabled us to change and develop far more quickly than through biological evolution alone.

But the downside of this inbuilt response-interpretation mechanism is that we expend a significant amount of mental resources monitoring and assessing others’ actions.

“Removing the involuntary modelling of another worker’s behaviour can improve our work speed,” Welsh suggests in the Journal of Human Movement Science.

Diet of worms

THE world of slimming pills is fraught with charlatanism, but these ones may work too well: Hong Kong health officials this week warned people not to eat parasitic worms, in response to adverts for weight-loss tablets containing worm eggs. A spokesman cautioned that the advertised worm infestations cause pain, vomiting and diarrhoea and may be difficult to cure. Adult ascaris worms can grow to more than 30cm long and, says the Hong Kong Health Department: “Surgical removal of the worms may be required in case of obstruction.”

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