Meet Peanut, the world’s ugliest dog
PETALUMA: It’s that time of year again when dogs with unusually large heads, hairless bodies and other oddities compete to be the World’s Ugliest Dog.
This year’s winner? A 2-year-old mutt named Peanut, whose wild white and brown hair, bulging eyes and protruding teeth belie his sweet, energetic personality.
Although Peanut is healthy now, his owner, Holly Chandler of Greenville, North Carolina, says he was seriously burned as a puppy, resulting in bald patches all over his body.
Chandler hopes Peanut’s victory will help raise awareness about animal abuse.
“We’re trying to use him as a poster child for what can happen to animals who are abused,” she said.
She plans to use the $1,500 prize to pay for other animals’ veterinary bills.
The contest, held at the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds in Petaluma, California, is in its 26th year.
The dogs are scored by a three-judge panel in several categories, including special or unusual attributes, personality and natural ugliness.
The past five winners have included a duck-footed beagle, boxer and basset hound mix with a waddle, a Chinese crested and Chihuahua mix with a protruding tongue and short tufts of hair and a Chihuahua with a missing eye and a camel’s back.
Here are photos of this year’s contestants and past years’ winners. (Agencies)
Dog meat festival celebrated in China despite protests
Beijing: People in southern China celebrated the annual dog meat festival Saturday despite mounting protests from animal welfare groups and pet owners from across the world.
The festival to mark the summer solstice in Yulin City of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, slated for June 21, witnesses around 2,000 dogs being consumed every year, Xinhua reported.
In the morning, farmers and vendors packed dogs into cages and transported them to the market for selling. “I come every year. This time, I caged three dogs for trade. All are raised by my family,” Xinhua quoted a farmer from Fumian district as saying.
A vendor surnamed Pang from Xingye county said that he bought dogs in villages before the summer solstice and traded them later in the market.
“In previous years, I can sell 70 to 80 dogs on the occasion and earn four yuan (less than $1) per kilogram of dog meat,” Pang added.
Among sellers and buyers in the market, there were quite a few who bought dogs, but not for eating.
“We have bought more than 200 dogs and planned to bring them to our hometown. We cannot stop local people celebrating the long-standing festival, but we can save as many dogs in our own way,” said a woman surnamed Yang, a dog lover from Tianjin City, who paid an average of 400 yuan to 500 yuan for each dog.
Although local residents did not give up their tradition, the dog meat festival sales have decreased under pressure from animal welfare groups and dog lovers, who have protested in markets and restaurants over the past few days.
Some protests even led to confrontations.
As of Friday, 17 local restaurants serving dog dishes had stopped this business, while four other illegal ones were banned by the city’s food and drug administration, said the administration’s deputy head Chen Taotao. Chen said 48 restaurants in Yulin are still serving dog dishes. (IANS)
Mystery of missing 50,000-strong Persian army solved
London: Scientists have solved one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of all times: the sudden disappearance of a large Persian army of 50,000 men in the Egyptian desert around 524 BC. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Persian King Cambyses entered the Egyptian desert near Luxor (then Thebes) with 50,000 men.
The troops supposedly never returned and were swallowed by a sand dune. “Since the 19th century, people have been looking for this army: amateurs, as well as professional archaeologists,” said Professor Olaf Kaper from Leiden University, Netherlands. “Some expect to find somewhere under the ground an entire army, fully equipped. However, experience has long shown that you cannot die from a sandstorm, let alone have an entire army disappear,” said Kaper. Kaper has now put forward an entirely different explanation. He argues that the army did not disappear, but was defeated.
“My research shows that the army was not simply passing through the desert; its final destination was the Dachla Oasis. This was the location of the troops of the Egyptian rebel leader Petubastis III.
He ultimately ambushed the army of Cambyses, and in this way managed from his base in the oasis to reconquer a large part of Egypt, after which he had himself crowned Pharaoh in the capital, Memphis,” said Kaper. The fact that the fate of the army of Cambyses remained unclear for such a long time is probably due to the Persian King Darius I, who ended the Egyptian revolt with much bloodshed two years after Cambyses’ defeat. He attributed the defeat of his predecessor to natural elements, researchers said.
Kaper made the discovery accidentally; he was not looking for it actively. In collaboration with New York University and the University of Lecce, he was involved for the last ten years in excavations in Amheida, in the Dachla Oasis. Earlier this year, Kaper deciphered the full list of titles of Petubastis III on ancient temple blocks. “That’s when the puzzle pieces fell into place,” he said.
“The temple blocks indicate that this must have been a stronghold at the start of the Persian period. Once we combined this with the limited information we had about Petubastis III, the excavation site and the story of Herodotus, we were able to reconstruct what happened,” said Kaper. (PTI)
Now, vibrating gloves to teach braille
London: Researchers have created smart gloves that can help the blind learn braille through vibrations. The gloves created by researchers at Georgia Tech in the US have vibrating motors at the knuckle of each finger. When one of them vibrates, the wearer presses the corresponding key, and audio feedback tells them what letter they are typing. In tests, a group of people who had never used Braille before wore the gloves while typing a set phrase.
The group was then distracted by playing a game for 30 minutes. During this time, half of the participants’ gloves kept pulsing in time to continuing audio cues, a concept called passive haptic learning, which has also been used to teach piano in the past, ‘New Scientist’ reported. The pulses stopped for the rest of the group, while the audio carried on. Researchers found that those who received the passive haptic training were much more adept than those who didn’t, making 30 per cent fewer errors. They remembered and could read more than 70 per cent of the Braille phrase, while the control group only managed 22 per cent. (PTI)