Animal and Human Health

If you’re looking for the most amazing animal facts, you’re at the right place. Here is animal and human health relationship that can surprise you so much:

Animals play an important role in many people’s lives. In addition to seeing-eye dogs and dogs that can be trained to detect seizures, animals can also be used in occupational therapy, speech therapy, or physical rehabilitation to help patients recover. Aside from these designated therapeutic roles, animals are also valued as companions, which can certainly affect the quality of our lives. Is that companionship beneficial to our health?

The better we understand the human-animal bond, the more we can use it to improve people’s lives. 

This article summarizes what is known and not known about how animals help improve the health and well-being of people, and what the implications might be for helping people who don’t have pets of their own. Over 71 million American households (62%) have a pet, and most people think of their pets as members of the family. Some research studies have found that people who have a pet have healthier hearts, stay home sick less often, make fewer visits to the doctor, get more exercise, and are less depressed. Pets may also have a significant impact on allergies, asthma, social support, and social interactions with other people.

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Penguins are birds but can't fly

Have you thought about this penguin facts mystery: Penguins are birds but can't fly? Do you want to have reasonable explaination for this? Keep reading

Like many birds, penguins must travel a long way between their feeding and breeding grounds. But rather than fly, they swim. It is a hard journey that has left biologists scratching their heads over why the birds did not keep their ability to fly as their diving ability evolved. A new study argues that birds cannot be both masterful divers and flyers, because flying abilities must weaken as the animals adapt to diving.

Rather than looking at penguins, a team led by biologist Kyle Elliott at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, examined species of diving seabirds that still have some ability to fly. These included the pelagic cormorant (Phalacrocorax pelagicus), a species that propels itself underwater with webbed feet, and the thick-billed murre (Uria lomvia), which flaps its wings underwater to swim.

The researchers tagged murres with recorders that measured the time of dives as well as depth and temperature, and cormorants with data-loggers that measured depth, temperature and acceleration changes during dives. They also injected isotope-tagged water into the birds. When the researchers tested the birds later, the tags enabled them to work out just how much carbon dioxide and water vapour the birds had expelled since the water was introduced, and thus to calculate the energy expended for diving and flying.

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The team then compared their results to some that had already been collected for birds such as geese and penguins. They found that both cormorants and murres must spend exceedingly large amounts of energy to fly — the highest known among all flying birds.

When it came to diving, the energy costs for the foot-propelled cormorants were much higher than expected for a similarly sized penguin. The wing-propelled murres had diving costs lower than those of cormorants, but still 30% greater than those experienced by penguins of the same size. The results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

The findings reveal a snapshot showing that murres are sitting on an evolutionary knife edge. Elliott and his colleagues speculate that because the wings of a murre are still built for flight, they create drag underwater. Furthermore, their small bodies, which are just light enough for them to take off, cool down more quickly than the bulkier bodies of penguins.

“Basically, they have to reduce their wings or grow larger to improve their diving, and both would make flying impossible,” says Robert Ricklefs, an ornithologist at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and co-author of the paper.

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Life of sea stars in museum’s glass menagerie

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From 1863 to 1890, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka made more than 10,000 sea creatures out of glass. There were anemones with tapered tentacles and pearled undersides, translucent jellyfish trailing the most delicate threads and feather stars more than worthy of their name despite their rigid composition. The intricate invertebrates, crafted by the father-son team at their studio in Dresden, Germany, were shipped across the world to serve as teaching models at universities and museums. In an era before marine surveys and underwater photography, before the rise of scuba diving resorts, the Blaschkas showed the world the wonders of the sea.

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Over five dozen of their glass wonders are now on display at the Corning Museum of Glass in “Fragile Legacy.” Though the exhibit opens with glass eyeballs and a piece of jewelry — a nod to the Blaschkas’ pre-invertebrate business — the highlight is a darkened room set up like an aquarium, with sea creatures seemingly floating in blue. There’s a notable absence of museum placards and descriptions. “We really want people to look at the glassiness,” says Marvin Bolt, a curator of the exhibit, before pointing out the “Field Guide to Underwater Models.” The pamphlet contains each animal’s species name, as it was known in 1885 (when Cornell University acquired the pieces, now on loan to Corning) and as it is known today.
The Blaschkas combined stalks, pearls and a super thin barrel of glass to create this sea anemone, labeledBunodes crispa. While some glass was fused while hot, other pieces were attached once the glass had cooled.

Often the Blaschkas used other materials, such as paper, as seen in the webbing between this octopus’s tentacles. Different materials react differently to environmental conditions over time, creating a challenge for conservationists.

This oaten pipes hydroid, Tubularia indivisa, could easily be mistaken for a type of flower. The Blaschkas called the draping pearls “Tubularia grapes.”

Before creating their glass, the Blaschkas made detailed drawings from live organisms, shipments of semipreserved invertebrates and natural history texts. “The more they started making, the more well-known they became and the more access they were given,” says curator Marvin Bolt.

To create this sea cucumber, the Blaschkas glued glass dots onto the tubular body and then painted the body. The 15 tentacles surrounding the mouth help the creature feed

The aquarium offers a sense of the Blaschkas’ style, but it’s the room next door that provides the substance. Sketches and watercolors, bottles of colored powders, tweezers, pliers, scoops and wire, along with a demonstration video, give a fuller sense of how the Blaschkas did their work. Equally impressive are the matchboxes filled with kleine augen (“little eyes” in German) and other tiny but uniform component pieces, suggestive of an assembly line approach to handcrafting the final glass forms. A series of case studies explains how conservators stabilized the pieces, and a trailer for a related documentary, also titled Fragile Legacy, highlights the vulnerability, not of the glass, but of the real-world creatures living in warming seas.

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