A pat on the head is better than some kind words to your dog, found a study from January. If they have a choice, dogs will always take petting over praise, and that was found among shelter dogs and those with owners.

Phrased in fancy science talk: "We first assessed preference using a concurrent choice procedure in which dogs were able to choose between interacting with a person providing petting or a person providing vocal praise. The time allocated to available alternatives can be used as a measure of preference (Baum and Rachlin, 1969), in this case dogs’ preference for different types of human social interaction. By measuring proximity, our results might point to interactions that could be relevant in producing attachment behaviors."

The KFC Tray Typer is a paper thin, durable, rectangular, standard QWERTY keyboard that you link to your device via Bluetooth and use it to type answers, questions, stories, thoughts or impressions to your personal contacts. Use SMSes, emails, tweets, or whatever else you have on your phone. You can echarge it via USB when it runs out of juice.

Most importantly, you won't get your device all greasy because, you know, you can't go 5 minutes without showing people your chicken bones on Instagram.

DogTilligent has developed the All-in-One Smart Dog Collar with GPS, WiFi capability, an accelerometer, a thermometer, a speaker, LED lights, and a microphone.

It helps a dog owner keep track of the dog by warning when the collar has traveled beyond a predetermined location. The Virtual Leash warns the dog when it’s moving away from a human companion by whistling, vibrating, and simulating a tug on the collar.


H/T Neatorama

In 1849, Abraham Lincoln was still 11 years from becoming President but his experience as a deck-hand on a Mississippi flat-boat would make him the first U.S. President to have a patent - No. 6,469 for utilizing inflated cylinders to float grounded vessels through shallow water - "buoying boats over shoals".

Also of note: 

In 1649 the famed French mathematician, physicist and inventor Blaise Pascal obtained a monopoly by royal decree for his computing machine.



And Orville and Wilbur Wright received the first airplane patent in the USA, for "new and useful improvements in Flying Machines" (U.S. No. 821,393).

What if everyone ate an American diet?

Well, it would mean the developing world finally has parity with the developed world, which has been the entire goal of progressive culture. But now that it is achievable, progressive doomsday prophets who have taken over an alarming chunk of the environmental movement (and there are hundreds of these sites, all of them making money and paying people) are saying that we need to go back in time, when only rich elites had a healthy normal diet and everyone else ate rich or bread or whatever.

It's hard to imagine that people on food stamps are buying lobsters and crab but Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin want to make sure it happens a lot less: a new bill would require that two thirds of food be from a restricted list like beef, pork, poultry, potatoes, dairy products and foodstuffs available under the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program. 

Back in 1982, the Almeida Family was saddened to learn that their beloved pet, Manuela, a young red-footed tortoise, had gone missing.

Their house was under renovation at the time, so the family just assumed that the slow-moving animal had slipped out through a gate left open by the construction crew -- disappearing into the forest near their home in Realengo, Brazil.

The truth was far more odd. 

Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

Unless you are a hippie growing organic, vegetarian, free-range chickens in Oregon, you probably recognize that nature is out to kill you. But nothing is out to kill you like nature in Australia.

But Aussies can find a positive in anything and baby spiders that build streamers of silk which they use to surf the winds as high as 3 kilometers off the ground and then cover buildings and fields get called “Angel Hair.”


A home surrounded by spiderwebs as floodwaters rise around Wagga Wagga in 2012. Photo: Reuters

Because everyone knows that the best part of waking up is staying in sweatpants all day and eating cereal while watching Warner Herzog documentaries, the chilled out folks on the West Coast are pairing your morning cup of joe with marijuana to start the day.

Yahoo! Finance reports that a Seattle pot shop is selling pods of “premium infused coffee” for $10 a pop. Each pod contains 10 mg of THC and fits in standard single-serve coffee makers.

Recreational marijuana use is legal there, and of course they love their coffee.