Super Size Meeeeeee-oooow

Because having just a plain old cat won’t do, Brits are now breeding super cats.

What’s a Super Cat you ask? Take your average domestic cat, breed it with a wild exotic like a Savannah or a Geoffrey and you get a 35 lb. super-duper cat with claws, teeth and jaw muscles to match its hefty weight, reports the Daily Mail.Beyond the fact that a half-exotic could cause some serious harm to a child or small animal, you’d need a litter box the size of a sandbox!

Despite safety and litter box concerns, some breeders boast a six-month long waiting list and a price tag of almost $9,000 for a super kitten. Thankfully these cats are illegal in several U.S. states and Australia reports the Daily Mail.

Top 10 Tips For Adopting The Right Dog For You

So how do you do it? Here are their Top 10 tips for adopting a dog succesfully:

1. Consider your lifestyle.
This is the single most important factor in determining what kind of dog will match you or your family the best, says Saunders. How much time do you have to spend with a dog – are you a busy, single person with an active social life, or are you a homebody with tons of time to give to your dog? a”All kinds of lifestyles can accommodate a dog, but there’s a huge difference between adopting a puppy who’s not housetrained and needs lots of exercise versus a more senior pet who’s more willing to hang out and sleep while you’re out,” she says. Consider energy levels, size and, of course, expense. Food, grooming and routine veterinary care, as well as emergencies, all add up. Also important to note: Some dogs are easier to train than others. “Terriers are known for being tenacious and stubborn,” says Saunders. “For a brand-new pet parent with no dog experience, that can be a challenge. They might want to stick to a dog that doesn’t have as challenging a temperament.”

2. Consider your children.
For families with kids under 7 Sternberg strongly recommends having a professional trainer accompany you to help pick out a dog “with the right temperament” at a shelter or rescue group . She notes that children between the ages of 2 and 7 are the largest population to suffer dog bites.

3. Choose a shelter wisely.
Ideally, you’ll want time and space to interact with a dog you’re considering taking home, says Sternberg. Visit your local shelters or animal rescue group, and try not to judge a facility from its exterior or discriminate between a “no-kill” shelter that doesn’t euthanize any dogs and a city shelter with a euthanasia policy. “One shelter’s euthanasia number is everyone’s euthanasia number,” says Sternberg. Be sure to walk around and look in every kennel. “Even if you think you’ve fallen in love with a dog in cage number four, walk all the way to the back to cage number 40,” says Sternberg.

Maybe A Pig Is Mans Best Friend

When a hobby-store owner in Cincinnati sliced off his fingertip in 2005 while showing a customer why the motor on his model plane was dangerous, he went to the emergency room without the missing tip. He couldn’t find it anywhere. The doctor bandaged the wound and recommended a skin graft to cover the top of his right-middle stub for cosmetic purposes, since nothing could be done to rebuild the finger.

Months later, he had regrown it, tissue, nerves, skin, fingernail and all.This particular hobbyist happened to have a brother in the tissue-regeneration business, who told him to forego the skin graft and instead apply a powdered extract taken from pig’s bladder to the raw finger tip. The extract, called extracellular matrix, lays the framework that cells use to generate any given body part. It’s like a cellular scaffolding, and all animals have it. It holds the signals that direct cells to divide, differentiate and build themselves into a specific form.

Extracellular matrix is a component of body tissue that functions outside of the body’s cells (thus the “extracellular” designation). It’s made up mostly of collagen, a type of protein. So extracellular matrix extracted from the bladder of a pig does not actually have any of the pig’s cells in it.

Transgenic Songbirds Provide New Tool To Understand The Brain

The ability to manipulate songbird genes may yield the molecular secrets of vocal learning and neuronal replacement.

You can learn a lot from an animal. By manipulating the DNA of mice, flies, frogs and worms, scientists have discovered a great deal about the genes and molecules behind many of life’s essential processes. These basic functions often work about the same in people as they do in “model” animals. But if you want to study more sophisticated cognitive processes such as humans’ ability to learn language from one another, you need a more sophisticated organism. For the first time, researchers have devised a way to alter the genes of the zebra finch, one of a handful of social animals that learn to “speak” by imitating their fellows.

After decades of studying the behavior and anatomy of vocal learning, scientists will be able to use the technique to explore vocal learning at the molecular level. The new tool, reported online in the September 28 issue of PNAS Early Edition, may also reveal secrets about exactly how, when and why some neurons are replaced in the adult brain.