Ben Sacks, the director of the Canid Diversity and Conservation Group in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine has a dream: to take on the huge task of compiling an “atlas” of all the world’s dogs — whether wild, domestic, stray, or something in-between — that includes information on what they eat, how they relate to humans in different cultural contexts, what they look like and other physical data.

Newly published results from one project that involved Sacks, along with UC Davis post-doc researcher Sarah Brown and UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine professor Niels Pedersen, as well as other researchers from around the world, point toward surprising conclusions in the field. After careful genetic analysis of 642 dogs, and also some wolves, in areas as varied as Canada, Israel, Iran, China, Australia and Bali, it appears that modern European dogs stem mostly from Southeast Asian dogs that were brought to Europe as a result of the Silk Trade.

This is important because it was previously believed that European dogs descended mostly from Middle Eastern dogs, which in turn descended mostly from Southeast Asian dogs. Now there appears to be very little genealogical linkage between modern European dogs and modern Middle Eastern dogs.

“This was kind of a surprise,” Sacks said . “It’s not what we did the study to look for.”

One of the main purposes of the study was to find out if modern Middle Eastern dogs and modern Southeast Asian dogs are indigenous, meaning they descend from long lineages of dogs in their respective areas. The study supports this conclusion.

Another important ramification of the new study is that now, Europe is once again a candidate for the ultimate historical origins of the world’s domesticated dogs. According to Sacks and Pedersen, there could have been multiple domestication events in Eurasia.

“Europe is back in the game,” Sacks said.

Sacks and Brown are also working with UC Davis anthropology professor Christyann Darwent in a project involving the genetic study of Arctic dogs and their relationship to Inuits. Studying the DNA of ancient dogs found in archaeological sites is helpful as a substitute for studying ancient human DNA, since genetic testing of this type involves the destruction of parts of the remains.

“I’m interested in how dogs were used by prehistoric and historic groups — for example, in sled pulling, pack carrying, hunting assistance [and as a] food source,” Darwent said. “Our recent research has pushed the Canadian Inuit dog breed back to at least 1300 to 1400 AD. Further studies are underway to understand the antiquity and migration of dogs across the Arctic.”

Brown is enthusiastic about interdisciplinary work involving dogs and humans.

“Blending veterinary genetics with anthropology and archaeology research is definitely increasing in popularity,” Brown said. “There are so many types of questions that can be answered in ways never thought possible by the simple combination of these disciplines.”

BRIAN RILEY can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

We can build it. We have the technology. Research into unmanned robotics has received ample attention lately. This is mostly due to the military’s increased use of drones to fight remotely without endangering human life. However, unmanned robots are also receiving attention from engineers who wish to use them not for waging war but for performing rescues in the aftermath of disasters. When the terrain is treacherous, the air is toxic or when hazardous chemicals pervade the environment, robots need to be able to navigate and do their job in the most effective way possible.

Researchers at the UC Berkeley Center for Interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration in Education and Research (CiBER) lab are working on a robotic design that uses a tail derived from lizards and dinosaurs to provide unsurpassed stability even when the robots lose their balance.

“Inspiration from lizards will likely lead to far more agile search-and-rescue robots,” said Robert Full, team leader and a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley.

The research team, consisting of graduate and undergraduate students in biology and engineering, has discovered that lizards use their tails as a counterbalance to prevent them from falling head-over-heels when they jump. The team added a tail to a robotic car called Tailbot and found that landing safely after losing balance is strongly dependant on the angle of the tail relative to the body.

The team used high-speed cameras to film lizards as they jumped.

“To see whether the lizards used their tails to stabilize themselves, we had them run down a track and jump up to a wall,” said Thomas Libby, an integrative biology graduate student and co-author of the study. “We used a slippery patch to make them slip during the jump and If they couldn’t stabilize themselves, they would crash headfirst into the wall.”

The researchers found that the lizards swung their tails up or down to keep their body perfectly oriented for an accurate landing. The swinging motion of the tail transfers angular momentum away from their body, which reduces rotation during jumps and fast movement.

“It’s analogous to how a human might swing their arms when they slip on ice, but lizards are much more effective at it because their tails are so large,” Libby said.

As Libby pointed out, directly copying a lizard’s tail for a mechanical design is a bad idea. The live lizard uses its tail for many functions that include maintaining balance, storing fat, communication and defense. The mechanical version will not have to satisfy all of these requirements. Their research shows that the tail from a velociraptor would have much more effective stabilizing properties, but there just is not enough data available to know if velociraptors had the same amount of tail articulation (range of motion) that the lizards do.

“The biological form is not the target. If other technologies were better we would [use them], for example, a small flywheel,” said Evan Chang-Siu, a mechanical engineering graduate student on the Berkeley team. “We analyzed the trade-offs and have come to the conclusion that tails are uniquely suited to this task.”

To undertake a project of this complexity and magnitude requires a remarkable level of interdisciplinary cooperation. Biologists had to work with engineers, who had to work with programmers and all of these groups had to work cohesively to make a working final product.

“The interdisciplinary team was the key to the whole project,” said Libby. “Not only did the lizards inspire the robot, but the robot was then used as a physical model to shape our hypothesis for the animals.”

The robots are not yet ready for large-scale use, but as researchers refine the design, the robots come closer and closer to real-life use in the field.

HUDSON LOFCHIE can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

Of the myriad childhood illnesses and disorders that cause anxiety to pregnant women everywhere, few are as common yet mysterious as autism. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about one in every 150 children are born with autism; however, despite decades of research, scientists are left with scant clues on the possible cause or causes of this disorder.

A UC Davis study called Markers of Autism Risk in Babies: Learning Early Signs (MARBLES) is a unique attempt to find and test many possible causes and how they may interact to cause autism.

Despite its common, singular name, autism is more accurately described as being part of a spectrum, called Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) that vary in severity. The most severe is Autistic Disorder, what most people think of as “classic” autism. People with Autistic Disorder have problems communicating in social situations, overreact to minor changes in routine and may develop obsessive interests or other unusual behaviors.

The most common way to study the possible causes of autism (and many other conditions) is through twin studies. The idea here is that the twins will have the same environment and same age; the only thing that is different between identical and fraternal twins is that identical twins share all of their DNA. If the identical twins are more likely to both have autism than the fraternal twins, then it makes it more likely the cause of autism is genetic.

However, twin studies have a major weakness. If the answer isn’t primarily in the genes, the twin studies don’t have much more to say.

“Twin studies are concerned with heritability, while MARBLES is looking for the non-heritable factors, which is everything except DNA,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiologist, environmental chemicals expert and the MARBLES study principal investigator.

The process of looking for these non-heritable factors the MARBLES way means first finding mothers of autistic children who plan to become pregnant again. When the mother does become pregnant, the team gets to work collecting samples of pretty much everything a child is exposed to in its first few years: blood, urine, breast milk, stool, even things like dust and cleaning products.

“We do a walk through which details how many TVs are in the house, and we do a dust collection for the dust in the house,” said McKenzie Oliver, the project manager of MARBLES. “We have nutrition questionnaires, environmental history questionnaires, exposure questionnaires, so we get actual samples to analyze any self-reported data.”

The work isn’t just on the researchers’ end, though. The mother has to fill out a weekly symptom diary while she is pregnant, a monthly diary for the first year of the baby’s life and a quarterly diary for the two years after that.

The work can be taxing.

“We have some families that are really excited to be part of the research and will do anything to help us and don’t think of us as a burden in their life,” Oliver said. “With other [families], we struggle to get them to complete the questionnaires and forms and complete a visit.”

When the families live far away, there are other challenges. Most of the study involves home visits, but they do have to visit a MIND Institute clinic, which can be problematic.

“Some families already have two or three kids that may be in school, and have to drive all the way to Sacramento,” Oliver said. “It can be their whole day to drive from San Jose to Sacramento, and going to the MIND Institute and having to go back. It’s a real challenge that we’re facing now.”

Hertz-Picciotto, the principal investigator, thinks looking at the big picture of environmental factors is the way to find clues.

“Environmental factors have to be taken broadly, including nutrition, maternal medical and obstetric [women’s reproduction] conditions (which create the environment for the fetus) and some chemicals in household products, particularly those that disrupt systems crucial for fetal development,” Hertz-Picciotto said .

Funding for the project comes partially from the UC Davis Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (MIND) Institute, but they also received a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

“We’re at the first five years of the grant, so things are just getting started,” Oliver said.

AMY STEWART can be reached at science@theaggie.org.

I’ve often heard students swear by the warming effects of alcohol in the winter cold. Even though college always seems to be booze season, can it really help you stave off the flu and cold season?

Those of you who abide by the preachings of ethanol, I have some bad news. Alcohol actually lowers core body temperature, even though it makes you feel warmer.

That drink of hooch you sip to banish the cold acts as a vasodilator — meaning that it widens the blood vessels. This mechanism allows blood to flow closer to the skin where the nerves that perceive temperature reside. When this happens the body feels like it’s warm because it senses the warmth of the blood.

However, by diverting heat to these nerves, less heat is being transferred to the body’s core. In addition, with the blood flowing closer to the skin it can more easily exchange heat with the cold environment, which can lower your overall body temperature even more.

Alcohol is also suspected to be involved in disrupting other real mechanisms of temperature regulation. For instance, the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine has found that alcohol decreases the body’s ability to shiver, a primary method of temperature control. Other research has shown that alcohol’s illusory effect on temperature may cause a sweating reaction — further cooling the body down. In more extreme circumstances, these effects have been known to cause or complicate hypothermia.

So, next time you think a swig from the bottle will keep you comfortable, keep this article in mind. Leave alcohol to do its real work: social lubrication and creating embarrassing Facebook pictures.

ALEX STANTON can be reached at science@theaggie.org.