Fun Stuffs: Dog metacognition, Tarski used drugs, Soul Machine babies, FarmBots

Dogs know when they don't know

DogStudies lab... have shown that dogs possess some "metacognitive" abilities -- specifically, they are aware of when they do not have enough information to solve a problem and will actively seek more information... a test in which a reward (food/toy) is placed by one researcher behind one of the two fences while another researcher held the dog. They found that the dogs looked through gaps in the fences significantly more often when they had not seen where the reward was hidden.

 Amusingly, looking through the gaps didn't help sometimes.

The researchers theorize that... the dogs get so excited about finding the reward, that they cannot stop themselves from approaching the closest fence even when they have seen that the reward is probably not there.

3 great ways to humanely produce meat that probably won't sell well

Warning: this is like a Cracked.com list article, but try to take it more seriously.

1. Cancer lab meat. 

It might be a good idea to make lab meat out of cow cancer muscle cells.

Think about it, cancer cells are made to reproduce like crazy, so it might be a lot easier to make lab meat from cancer muscle cells, compared to using healthy muscle cells. And there has been precedence: the HeLa cells, famous for reproducing easily, are cancerous.

But when I searched, I cannot find any prior art on this. All that I could find were like "does steak cause cancer" and irrelevant.

Why it won't sell well: As rapid and cheap as cancer cell reproduction might be, it's almost certain that they won't make any structure. Tumors tend to be highly disorganized globs, completely different from healthy muscle tissue. As such, it would probably not taste like steaks. The only use would be for meat sludge, as used in meat nuggets, meatloafs, and meat stuffings.

Also, because of how consumers would be scared that eating cancer would give them cancer... even if they don't know that cancer isn't infectious, and they drink secretions from female cow's mammary glands without fearing of turning into calves themselves...