Computer Sciences

Digitize your dog into a computer game

Researchers from the University of Bath have developed motion capture technology that enables you to digitize your dog without a motion capture suit and using only one camera.

Energy & Green Tech

Energy companies turn to animal poo for clean power

In the search for clean electricity, power companies in Finland are going green by way of brown, and have set their sights on a previously untapped energy source: animal dung.

Robotics

Team of SpotMini robots pull a box truck up a hill

Robot company Boston Dynamics has made a statement just prior to putting its SpotMini on the market, releasing a video showing a team of 10 SpotMinis pulling a box truck slightly uphill in a parking lot. The SpotMini, dog-like ...

Engineering

Meet the virtual pooch that could prevent dog bites

A virtual dog could soon be used as an educational tool to help prevent dog bites, thanks to an innovative project led by the University's Virtual Engineering Centre (VEC).

Robotics

Why we programmed a robot to act like a sheepdog

Have you watched a sheepdog gather sheep on a hillside? The sheep move in waves and pulse back and forth, the dog weaving behind and around them. Squint a bit and it's like watching iron filings on a piece of paper being ...

Computer Sciences

AI system trained to respond like a dog

A team of researchers from the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for AI has trained an AI system to respond like a dog using data from an actual animal. In their paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, ...

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Dog

The dog (Canis lupus familiaris, pronounced /ˈkeɪ.nis ˈluːpəs fʌˈmɪliɛəris/) is a domesticated subspecies of the Gray Wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The domestic dog has been one of the most widely kept working and companion animals in human history. Amongst canine enthusiasts, the word "dog" may also mean the male of a canine species, as opposed to the word "bitch."

The dog quickly became ubiquitous across culture in all parts of the world, and was extremely valuable to early human settlements. For instance, it is believed that the successful emigration across the Bering Strait might not have been possible without sled dogs. Dogs perform many roles for people, such as hunting, herding, protection, and, more recently, assisting handicapped individuals. Currently, there are estimated to be 400 million dogs in the world.

Over the 15,000 year span that the dog had been domesticated, it diverged into only a handful of landraces, groups of similar animals whose morphology and behavior have been shaped by environmental factors and functional roles. As the modern understanding of genetics developed, humans began to intentionally breed dogs for a wide range of specific traits. Through this process, the dog has developed into hundreds of varied breeds, and shows more behavioral and morphological variation than any other land mammal. For example, height measured to the withers ranges from a few inches in the Chihuahua to a few feet in the Irish Wolfhound; color varies from white through grays (usually called "blue'") to black, and browns from light (tan) to dark ("red" or "chocolate") in a wide variation of patterns; coats can be short or long, coarse-haired to wool-like, straight, curly, or smooth. It is common for most breeds to shed this coat, but non-shedding breeds are also popular.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA