Living with a dog cuts child's risk of asthma by 15%, study shows

Having a dog in the family reduces a child’s risk of asthma by 15% and contact with farm animals can halve it, a comprehensive study has shown.

The findings lend strong support to the “hygiene hypothesis” that suggests living in too-clean conditions early in life can increase susceptibility to allergy conditions such as asthma.

Scientists analysed data on more than 1 million children born in Sweden between 2001 and 2010, where dog and farm animal ownership has to be registered by law.

Dog exposure during the first year of life was associated with a 15% lower likelihood of childhood asthma, while living close to farm animals cut the risk by 52%.

Lead scientist Dr Tove Fall, from Uppsala University in Sweden, said: “Earlier studies have shown that growing up on a farm reduces a child’s risk of asthma to about half.

“We wanted to see if this relationship was true also for children growing up with dogs in their homes. Our results confirmed the farming effect and we also saw that children who grew up with dogs had about 15% less asthma than children without dogs.

“Because we had access to such a large and detailed data set, we could account for confounding factors such as asthma in parents, area of residence and socio-economic status.”

The research, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, was possible because of Sweden’s organised system of national databases accessible to scientists. Every visit to a specialist physician and every prescription is recorded.

Co-author Prof Catarina Almqvist Malmros, from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, said: “These kind of epidemiological studies look for associations in large populations but do not provide answers on whether and how animals could protect children from developing asthma.

“We know that children with established allergy to cats or dogs should avoid them, but our results also indicate that children who grow up with dogs have reduced risks of asthma later in life.

“Thanks to the population-based design, our results are generalisable to the Swedish population and probably also to other European populations with similar culture regarding pet ownership and farming.”

According to the hygiene hypothesis, lack of early exposure to microbes and parasites may prevent the immune system developing properly. As a result, natural checks on unwanted immune responses that can lead to allergy are lacking.

Erika Kennington, head of research at Asthma UK, said: “Asthma is a complex condition with many different types and causes. While this study identifies a link to living with a dog or regular exposure to farm animals in the first year of a child’s life, and their chance of developing asthma by the age of six, more research is needed. This will help us better understand the effects so that it can be turned into practical advice for parents of young children.”

Pet Sounds: the animal noises sampled in song

Breaking news: Lil Bub, one of the best loved internet cats, will release her debut album Science & Magic on 4 December. According to Andrew WK, who helped create the record with Bub, not only is she the softest creature he has ever encountered, but “also the most musically and compassionately gifted. The songs on this album are her vision. They are by her, about her, and are her.”

Whether you consider it a callous effort to capitalise on one mutant cat’s craze for, or a pioneering step into the outer limits of musical experimentation, the cat album is currently having its moment: take rap duo Run the Jewels, who have released Meow the Jewels, a cat-sound remix of their last album. Or … actually that’s it. Just two albums. But two albums sampling cats in one week is two more than the previous 2015 years have offered up, so worth marking none the less (for the purpose of journalistic integrity, let’s include Mr Mitch and his meow-based track Catford. Which came out in 2013. Three’s a trend).

While the Lil Bub album smacks slightly of a traffic chasing marketing campaign, and Meow the Jewels is a gesture of goodwill (donations to its Kickstarter go to victims of police brutality and neglected animals), previously samples of animals in song have been used for their atmospheric, musical value. The sound of an animal can be symbolic, more evocative or expressive than that of a human’s voice. Take the distant murmurs on Kate Bush’s Moving – 15 seconds of whale song sampled from Songs of the Humpback Whale. In an interview with Sounds, Bush said: “Whales say everything about ‘moving’. It’s huge and beautiful, intelligent, soft inside a tough body.”

It can also be a handy scene-setting device: the nostalgic sound of seagulls squarking through Gruff Rhy’s Shark Ridden Waters, Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You – its tweeting birds replicating a bucolic idyll and the first flutters of fancy, or the clip clop and whinny of reindeer on Sleigh Ride by the Ronnettes. No mention of animal sampling symbolism would be complete without the salacious honk of an elephant on Missy Elliott’s Work It.

It’s not always used as a pleasant reminder of mother nature’s creations. Matthew Herbert’s One Pig – an album that documents a pig’s 20-week life, from birth to brutal slaughter – used the samples for a stark look at the meat industry. It’s a terrifying tool for music’s more malevolent, too – the sound of a predator snarling at the start and end of Butthole Surfers’ Mark Says Alright or HateBeak’s Feral Parrot. The world of EDM offers some savage sampling, too – such as Deadmau5’s use of rattlesnakes, or Raff Riley borrowing the sounds of febrile barking dogs.

The sampling of animals can even have its textural qualities, adding layers that an instrument may not – the cooing pigeons on Panda Bear’s Bro’s, or the quiet chatter of birds flitting throughout Radiohead’s The King of Limbs – during the introduction to Give Up the Ghost, the fade out of Codex, and layered under the flugelhorn (yes, flugelhorn) on Bloom.

Get this: spiders can “sail” on water

If, last week, you’d quizzed me about the dispersal strategies of spiders, I would have told you all about “ballooning”, how Charles Darwin, at sea on the Beagle in 1832, was stunned to see thousands of tiny, dusky red spiders come floating on board, borne on silky parachutes that trapped them in the rigging. This and other observations led him to conclude that “the habit of sailing through the air” was probably “characteristic of this tribe”.

 I would not, however, have told you that ballooning spiders can sail on water too, because I didn’t know they did until I read a paper out today in BMC Evolutionary Biology. These sailing skills, documented by Japanese research fellow Morito Hayashi and colleagues, make a lot of sense. Earth, after all, is largely water, so aerial dispersal is not a great idea unless you can cope with the presumably frequent fate of alighting on water.

Working in the “SpiderLab” at the University of Nottingham, Hayashi put hundreds of spiders from more than 20 different species “in a shallow tray filled with water to 1cm height”. When buffeted by “pump-generated air (i.e. wind)”, “spiders actively adopt postures that allow them to use the wind direction to control their journey on water,” he says. They are competent sailors even in salty and turbulent condition, the researchers find.

The paper describes five different water-related behaviours. Here they are:

1) Sailing

Sailing spiders raise their legs to create a kind of sail. “Sailing spiders smoothly and stealthily slide on the water surface without leaving any turbulence,” note Hayashi and co.

2) Upside-down sailing

This demands a “handstand-like posture”, the spider using its abdomen rather than legs to catch the wind.

3) Anchoring

Silk is released onto the surface of the water. This slows down the spider’s movement and may help tether the spider to the relative safety of a floating object

4) Walking

It’s just that, the spider rapidly propelling its legs in an effort to walk on the surface. [Re-reading Darwin’s account of the dusky red spiders he encountered off the coast of South America, it looks like he observed them walking on water: “The little aeronaut,” he wrote in his Journal of Researches, “could run with facility on the surface of water.”]

5) Death mimicry

“Death mimicry behaviour is likely to be a predator avoidance strategy, as is common to many animals.” Essentially, the spider touches the water and freezes. But owing to its water-repellent feet (see the dimples on the surface of the water), it still floats.

In a related investigation, the researchers collected data on ballooning. Those individuals and species that showed a readiness to balloon their way off a dry surface were also the ones with the greatest talent for sailing. “The sailing behaviour is almost completely associated with, and possibly a requirement for, the aeronautic behaviour,” they conclude.

“Being able to cope with water effectively ‘joins the dots’ as far as the spider is concerned,” says Sara Goodacre, head of the SpiderLab and a co-author on the paper. “It can move from one land mass to another, and potentially across huge spatial scales through the air,” she says. “If landing on water poses no problem then in a week or two they could be a long way away from where they started.”

Darwin would have loved this, a neat set of observations that helps explain why spiders are amongst the first to colonise new habitats and why many species are found all the way around the globe. They haven’t just been flying. They’ve been sailing too.

Happy birthday, Jia Jia: Hong Kong giant panda becomes oldest ever

It may not be considered a landmark birthday for humans, but turning 37 has made Hong Kong’s Jia Jia the oldest ever giant panda in captivity, and she celebrated in style.

Jia Jia is said to be still mobile but suffering from high blood pressure. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

 The equivalent of more than 100 years old in human terms, Jia Jia was presented with a towering birthday cake made from ice and fruit juice with the number 37 carved on top, in her enclosure at the city’s Ocean Park theme park.

“Jia Jia has achieved two Guinness world record titles – the oldest panda living in captivity and the oldest panda ever living in captivity,” said Blythe Ryan Fitzwilliam, adjudicator of Guinness World Records, during a ceremony at the park.

He offered her his congratulations, saying it was an “amazing longevity achievement”.

Jia Jia was born in the wild in Sichuan, China, in 1978 and was given to Hong Kong in 1999 to mark the semi-autonomous city’s handover by Britain two years earlier.

The previous record was held by a male panda called Du Du, who was also caught in the wild and died in July 1999 aged 36 in a zoo in China’s Hubei province.

Vet Paola Martelli said Jia Jia was still “moving about” though she suffered from cataracts and high blood pressure. “She is sleeping more, so is doing everything less. But she is ageing gracefully, just like your grandma,” she said.

Jia Jia. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Because she eats less bamboo she relies on fibre supplements, Martelli added.

Jia Jia, whose name translates as “excellence”, picked at fruit slices and bamboo around the ice cake to celebrate her big day.

Although the exact birth dates of Du Du and Jia Jia are unknown because they were born in the wild, Guinness said that based on the evidence, they concluded that Jia Jia had claimed the title by a few months.

There are fewer than 2,000 pandas now left in the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund, as their habitats have been ravaged by development. Roads and railways cut through the bamboo forests they depend upon in China’s Yangtze Basin, their primary habitat. Pandas rely on bamboo and eat almost nothing else.

Given their low birthrate, captive breeding programmes have become key to ensuring their survival.

Giant panda pregnancy has Washington zoo director 'cautiously optimistic'

The National Zoo’s giant panda Mei Xiang, who was showing signs of being pregnant, is actually carrying a developing fetus and could give birth in coming weeks, the Washington zoo said on Wednesday.

Expectant mother giant panda Mei Xiang sleeps indoors at Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park in Washington on Tuesday. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Veterinarians detected a 1.6in (4cm) fetus during an ultrasound on Wednesday of Mei Xiang, who is a star tourist draw in the US capital, the zoo said in a statement.

“Today, we are cautiously optimistic,” said Dennis Kelly, the zoo’s director.

Veterinarians estimate that Mei Xiang could give birth early next week or possibly in early September, the statement said.

The zoo warned, however, that there is a substantial possibility that the fetus could be miscarried or resorbed, a process in which a fetus is broken down into components and dispersed in the panda’s circulation.

Mei Xiang started showing a secondary rise in her urinary progesterone on 20 July, a sign of pregnancy or a false pregnancy.

Mei Xiang was artificially inseminated on 26 and 27 April. The procedures used frozen sperm from Hui Hui, a panda living in China, and fresh sperm from the National Zoo’s Tian Tian, it said.

Mei Xiang is showing behaviors at the David M Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat in line with pregnancy, such as spending more time in her den, body licking and cradling objects. The inside of the habitat has been closed to the public.

Giant pandas are one of the world’s most endangered species and have a very low reproductive rate, particularly in captivity. Their natural home is in a few mountain ranges in central China. There are about 1,600 giant pandas known to be living in the wild and some 300 in captivity, mostly in China.