Today on New Scientist: 19 February 2013

Doctors would tax sugary drinks to combat obesity

Hiking the price of fizzy drinks would cut consumption and so help fight obesity, urges the British Academy of Medical Royal Colleges

Space station's dark matter hunter coy about findings

Researchers on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which sits above the International Space Station, have collected their first results - but won't reveal them for two weeks

Huge telescopes could spy alien oxygen

Hunting for oxygen in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets is a tough job, but a new wave of giant telescopes should be up to the task

Evolution's detectives: Closing in on missing links

Technology is taking the guesswork out of finding evolution's turning points, from the first fish with legs to our own recent forebears, says Jeff Hecht

Moody Mercury shows its hidden colours

False-colour pictures let us see the chemical and physical landscape of the normally beige planet closest to the sun

LHC shuts down to prepare for peak energy in 2015

Over the next two years, engineers will be giving the Large Hadron Collider the makeover it needs to reach its maximum design energy

Insert real news events into your mobile game

From meteor airbursts to footballing fracas, mobile games could soon be brimming with news events that lend them more currency

3D-printing pen turns doodles into sculptures

The 3Doodle, which launched on Kickstarter today, lets users draw 3D structures in the air which solidify almost instantly

We need to rethink how we name exoplanets

Fed up with dull names for exoplanets, Alan Stern and his company Uwingu have asked the public for help. Will it be so long 2M 0746+20b, hello Obama?

A shocking cure: Plug in for the ultimate recharge

An electrical cure for ageing attracted the ire of the medical establishment. But could the jazz-age inventor have stumbled upon a genuine therapy?

Biofuel rush is wiping out unique American grasslands

Planting more crops to meet the biofuel demand is destroying grasslands and pastures in the central US, threatening wildlife

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Football: Manchester Utd chief executive David Gill to step down

LONDON: David Gill is to step down as chief executive of Manchester United on June 30, the English football giants announced on Wednesday.

In a statement on the club's official website, the 55-year-old Gill said his post-season exit would allow the Premier League leaders to "refresh themselves with new management and ideas".

United added that executive vice chairman Ed Woodward would replace Gill.

Gill is a vice-chairman of England's governing Football Association and one of his country's most highly regarded football administrators.

United co-chairman Joel Glazer said Gill, who will remain on the board at Old Trafford, was stepping down in part to advance his bid for election to the executive committee of European football's governing body, UEFA.

Gill himself made no comment about his post-United future in the statement, saying only it had been a hard decision to end 16 years of day-to-day involvement at Old Trafford, having joined the club as financial director in 1997 before becoming chief executive in September 2003.

"I've experienced some incredible highs, such as the Treble in 1999 and the League and Champions League double in 2008, and lows, like losing the title with the last kick of the season last year," he said.

"But that is what makes this club and this sport so compelling. It has been a very hard decision because I love this club and, as the fans' banner says, it is, 'more than a religion'.

"However, I have always been conscious of the fact that, as a member of staff, I was always just a temporary custodian of this marvellous institution.

"I am also of the view that all businesses need to refresh themselves with new management and ideas and after 10 years in charge, I believe it is appropriate for someone new to pick up the baton."

United manager Alex Ferguson, who has been at Old Trafford since 1986, paid tribute to Gill.

"I have been at United for over 26 years and for 23 of those years, my boss has been one of only two men: Martin Edwards, who brought me to the club, and David Gill," he said. "I have enjoyed working with both.

"Him stepping down is a big loss to me but the fact that he is staying on the board encourages me that the reason for his departure is heartfelt, that he believes it is time for the club to move on."

Glazer gave his backing to Gill's attempt to be elected to UEFA's executive committee.

"I hope that the decision he has made will be to the benefit of the game in Europe as a whole, as he seeks election to UEFA's executive committee," he said.

- AFP/de

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Google's electronic eyewear gets 'OK Glass' voice commands

A Google glass video, taken without the need to hold a camera, that's part of a video-chat hangout.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"OK Glass."

Those are the two words that Google showed today will initiate a variety of commands for its Glass computerized eyewear.

In the Google Glass "How it feels" video, people speak the words "OK Glass" to send a message, record a video, take a photo, launch a video-chat hangout, conduct a search, check the weather, and get driving directions.

The demo is a concrete illustration of how Google is evolving its technology from a mere search engine to a constant personal companion that augments your own mind.

When Microsoft introduced Windows 95, its Start menu became the gateway for just about anything you could do with the operating system. Google, hoping to advance computing beyond the era of PCs and even smartphones, no doubt hopes "OK Glass" will become as familiar.

The Glass eyewear perches a screen just above a person's ordinary field of view; the device itself is equipped with a processor, camera, head-tracking orientation sensors, and other electronics drawn from the smartphone industry. Google began selling Glass developer prototypes called Explorer last year for $1,500 that are due to ship this year.

Google's site shows off Glass's GoPro-like videocamera abilities, showing first-person views of table tennis, swordplay, trapeze acrobatics, jumping rope, sculpture carving, hot-air ballooning, and more. The company is trying to show it as a sort of real-time video Facebook you can use to share life with others as you experience what's going on.

Google's video and "what-it-does" explanation is very much from a first-person perspective, showing what it's like to wear the device. It makes for a very personal experience, reproducing what a person would see and adding an unobtrusive transparent Glass interface in the upper right.

But that's not the whole story of Glass, of course. Wearing the devices might be very personal for the user, but wearing Glass makes you look a bit cyborg. Surely many folks talking to a Glass-wearing person will be put off by the knowledge that there's a microphone and camera pointed right at them. Think of how differently people behave when the camera comes out for a photo op.

In time, people will adjust, as they have to people talking on phones as they walk down the street, especially if Glass becomes more mainstream, as Google expects Glass will be ready for consumers in 2014.

Google also announced a Glass promotion in which people who share interesting ideas about what to do with the device will get the Explorer model.

Google's Project Glass electronic eyewear is "strong and light," Google said.

(Credit:
Google)

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Florida Python Hunt Captures 68 Invasive Snakes

It's a wrap—the 2013 Python Challenge has nabbed 68 invasive Burmese pythons in Florida, organizers say. And experts are surprised so many of the elusive giants were caught.

Nearly 1,600 people from 38 states—most of them inexperienced hunters—registered for the chance to track down one of the animals, many of which descend from snakes that either escaped or were dumped into the wild.

Since being introduced, these Asian behemoths have flourished in Florida's swamps while also squeezing out local populations of the state's native mammals, especially in the Everglades. (See Everglades pictures.)

To highlight the python problem, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and its partners launched the 2013 Python Challenge, which encouraged registered participants to catch as many pythons as they could between January 12 and February 10 in state wildlife-management areas within the Everglades.

The commission gave cash prizes to those who harvested the most and longest pythons.

Frank Mazzotti, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida and scientific leader for the challenge, said before the hunt that he would consider a harvest of 70 animals a success—and 68 is close enough to say the event met its goals.

It's unknown just how many Burmese pythons live in Florida, but catching 68 snakes is an "exceptional" number, added Kenneth Krysko, senior herpetologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

Snakes in the Grass

Finding 68 snakes is impressive, experts say, since it's so hard to find pythons. For one, it's been unusually warm lately in Florida, which means the reptiles—which normally sun themselves to regulate their body temperature—are staying in the brush, making them harder to detect, Krysko said.

On top of that, Burmese pythons are notoriously hard to locate, experts say.

The animals are so well camouflaged that people can stand right next to one and not notice it. "It's rare that you get to see them stretched out—most of the time they're blending in," said Cheryl Millett, a biologist at the Nature Conservancy, a Python Challenge partner.

What's more, the reptiles are ambush hunters, which means they spend much of their time lying in wait in dense vegetation, not moving, she said.

That's why Millett gave the hunters some tips, such as looking along the water's edge, where the snakes like to hang out, and also simply listening for "something big moving through the vegetation."

Even so, catching 68 snakes is "actually is a little more than I expected," said Millett.

No Walk in the Park

Ruben Ramirez, founder of the company Florida Python Hunters, won two prizes in the competition: First place for the most snakes captured—18—and second place for the largest python, which he said was close to 11 feet (3.4 meters) long. The biggest Burmese python caught in Florida, nabbed in 2012, measured 17.7 feet (5.4 meters).

"They're there, but they're not as easy to find as people think," said Ramirez. "You're not going to be stumbling over pythons in Miami." (Related blog post: "What It's Like to Be a Florida Python Hunter.")

All participants, some of whom had never hunted a python before, were trained to identify the difference between a Burmese python and Florida's native snakes, said Millett. No native snakes were accidentally killed, she said.

Hunters were also told to kill the snakes by either putting a bolt or a bullet through their heads, or decapitating them-all humane methods that result "in immediate loss of consciousness and destruction of the brain," according to the Python Challenge website.

Ramirez added that some of the first-time or amateur hunters had different expectations. "I think they were expecting to walk down a canal and see a 10-foot [3-meter], 15-foot [4.5-meter] Burmese python. They thought it'd be a walk in the park."

Stopping the Spread

Completely removing these snakes from the wild isn't easy, and some scientists see the Python Challenge as helping to achieve part of that goal. (Read an opposing view on the Python Challenge: "Opinion: Florida's Great Snake Hunt Is a Cheap Stunt.")

"You're talking about 68 more animals removed from the population that shouldn't be there—that's 68 more mouths that aren't being fed," said the Florida museum's Krysko. (Read about giant Burmese python meals that went bust.)

"I support any kind of event or program that not only informs the general public about introduced species, but also gets the public involved in removing these nonnative animals that don't belong there."

The Nature Conservancy's Millett said the challenge had two positive outcomes: boosting knowledge for both science and the public.

People who didn't want to hunt or touch the snakes could still help, she said, by reporting sightings of exotic species to 888-IVE-GOT-1, through free IveGot1 apps, or www.ivegot1.org.

Millett runs a public-private Nature Conservancy partnership called Python Patrol that the Florida wildlife commission will take on in the fall. The program focuses not only on eradicating invasive pythons but on preventing the snake from moving to ecologically sensitive areas, such as Key West.

Necropsies on the captured snakes will reveal what pythons are eating, and location data from the hunters will help scientists figure out where the snakes are living—valuable data for researchers working to stop their spread.

"This is the most [number of] pythons that have been caught in this short of a period of time in such an extensive area," said the University of Florida's Mazzotti.

"It's an unprecedented sample, and we're going to get a lot of information out of that."

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Pistorius Shots Said to Come From High Angle

At the second day of a bail hearing for Olympian Oscar Pistorius, a South African investigator who arrived at the scene of the Feb. 14 fatal shooting said that Reeva Steenkamp was shot from a high angle, which prosecutors say contradicts the runner's account that he was not wearing his prosthetics when he shot his girlfriend to death.

Pistorius, a double-amputee who runs on carbon-fiber blades, appeared in court for the second day in a row after his arrest in the death of girlfriend Steenkamp at his gated home in Pretoria, South Africa.

Read Oscar Pistorius' Full Statement to the Court

PHOTOS: Paralympic Champion Charged in Killing

Arresting officer Hilton Botha told the court today that the 26-year-old was standing in the master bathroom when he shot the supermodel, who was crouched in a defensive position behind a locked door in a smaller powder room. He also said that the bullets that were fired had been fired from high up, and the bullets seemed to be coming in a downward direction.

"[The angle] seems to me down. Fired down," Botha told the court.

Pistorius said Tuesday that he went to the bathroom and fired through the door before putting on his prosthetic legs.

'Blade Runner' Appears in Court to Hear Murder Charges Watch Video

Oscar Pistorius Charged With Premeditated Murder Watch Video

Oscar Pistorius: Was Shooting Premeditated? Watch Video

He said he mistakenly shot his girlfriend, thinking she was an intruder.

Prosecutors also said that they found two boxes of testosterone in the bedroom, although the defense disputes that, saying it's just herbal supplements.

The court also heard that a witness, a neighbor who lives about 2,000 feet away from Pistorius' home, heard nonstop fighting the morning of the shooting.
"We have a witness who says she heard non-stop shouting and fighting between 2 and 3 a.m.," said prosecutor Gerrie Nel, who added that another witness saw lights on at the time of the gunshots.

Pistorius says he spent a quiet night with Steenkamp before the shooting.

Nel said that Pistorius' actions and phone calls on the night indicate pre-planning, and that there was a "deliberate aiming of shots at the toilet from about 1.5 meters [about 5 feet]."

He says Steenkamp was shot on the right side of her body.

Officer Botha also said Pistorius should be considered a flight risk because investigators discovered that he has offshore bank accounts and a house in Italy.

"I think it would be hard to get him back," Botha told the court. "This is a very serious crime, shooting an unarmed woman behind closed door."

Prosecutors also say they may file more charges for unlicensed ammunition, after a special-caliber .38 round was found in a safe in Pistorius' home.

Botha told the court today that he arrived at Pistorius' home at 4:15 a.m. Valentine's Day to find Steenkamp already dead, dressed in a white shorts and a black vest, and covered in towels. The only thing that Pistorius said was, 'I thought it was a burglar,'" according to Botha.

The 26-year-old sprinter Tuesday denied that he willfully killed Steenkamp, telling the court that he shot the woman through his bathroom door because he believed she was an intruder.

Botha said today that he attended Steenkamp's postmortem, and that she had three entrance wounds: one on the head, one in the elbow and one in the hip.

Describing the scene to the court, Botha said that the shots fired into the bathroom were aimed at the toilet bowl.

The shooter "would have to walk into the bathroom and turn directly at the door to shoot at the toilet the way the bullets went," he said.

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Insert real news events into your mobile game

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

(Image: MultiPlay.io)

Seen it in the news? Now play it: a mobile-game programming system allows 3D depictions of news events to be introduced into the action. It's been developed by MultiPlay.io, a British start-up that says the technology could make gameplay more current and provide new ways for designers and coders to make cash - perhaps selling "news injection" rights to news agencies, TV stations or newspapers.

The firm's HTML5 games creator, also called MultiPlay.io, lets users import 3D animations during gameplay, allowing, for instance, last week's meteor explosion over Russia to be pasted in above the game action, says one of the company's founders, Ashraf Samy Hegab. Similarly, he says, if a millionaire footballer hits the news in, say, a fight with a nightclub bouncer, lookalike avatars could engage in just such a fracas as you motor by in a driving game.

The system creates games for Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows Phone devices. Changes to games need to be made in a browser on a PC or Mac, but can be made in real time without you having to download an app update.

"We're using a clever way of splitting the game logic that lets you change the game on the fly, as easy as a drag-and-drop task in a browser," says Hegab. "You don't need to know anything about servers or 3D programming using our engine." The idea also lets you extend the game's virtual playing area by expanding the game map, or add 3D vehicles you've designed yourself, such as glitzy spacecraft or cars. You could even add a model of yourself.

But news injection is MultiPlay.io's main aim - and its founders are hoping to interest news agencies when Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona, Spain, later this month. They are not alone: adding news to make games more relevant is becoming popular, with some websites beginning to offer games with news-related activities built in, such as the fascinating Game The News, which "creates its own twists on news events in a playable form".

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Companies paying more bills on time

SINGAPORE: Companies are paying more bills on time, according to the Commercial Credit Bureau.

The bureau said the number of prompt commercial payments rose to 51.59 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year. That is up by a moderate 2.29 percentage points from 49.3 per cent in the previous quarter.

Prompt payment means a company has paid at least 90 per cent of its total bills within agreed upon payment terms.

It was the first time in two years that 50 per cent of prompt commercial payment transactions were recorded. This comes on the heels of a slight economic uptick in the fourth quarter last year. The Ministry of Trade and Industry estimates the economy grew by 1.1 per cent year-on-year in Q4 2012.

Year-on-year payment promptness also increased 12.09 per cent per cent from 39.5 per cent last year. Payment promptness was at its peak in Q3 2012 when it made up 61.2 per cent of all commercial transactions in Singapore.

But the number of slow payments (when a company pays less than 50 per cent of its bills on time) increased slightly last quarter, up 0.79 percentage points to 40.99 per cent.

The construction industry saw the biggest drop in defaults. Slow payments fell 8.24 percentage points to 41.19 per cent quarter-on-quarter. A year-on-year comparison shows a decline of 17.11 percentage points in payment defaults.

With heavy government investments in industrial projects and a strong pipeline of nationwide rail transit and road infrastructure projects, the downward trend in slow payments is likely to continue into the next quarter.

The retail industry - traditionally the worst paymaster - also saw defaults fall on the back of strong seasonal sales in December.

The retail sector registered 54.73 per cent slow payments, a decrease of 4.98 percentage points from Q3 2012.

The wholesale sector registered the lowest proportion of slow payments at 35.7 per cent a 4.68 percentage point increase from the previous quarter.

- CNA/fa

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For an iWatch to kick butt, Apple must innovate in batteries

If Apple is hard at work on an "iWatch," it will have to overcome battery issues bedeviling existing smartwatch makers.

This new crop of wrist devices has a lot more in common with smartphones than your old Timex. They have increasingly large displays, and can ferry over notifications and other data, acting as a second screen of sorts for your smartphone. For many of the latest models, that extra utility is not without a compromise: You've got to plug it in at the end of the day.

Charging a smartphone every day can be an annoyance, but most people are used to it. Watches are a different beast. Today's digital watches are designed much the same way they were 20 years ago, to last years at a time between battery replacements. That's held true for so long because they do little besides tell time.

While companies are doing all they can to reduce the power consumption of chips and screens, the fact remains that batteries haven't undergone the same technological sea change as other major portable device components. There haven't been the kind of advances in capacity that would let devices be used for days or even weeks on a single charge while keeping things small.

Bigger is better
On the smartphone front, manufacturers have responded to the power problem by increasing the capacity of the batteries that are shipped in phones, said Satoru Rick Oyama, a principal analyst at IHS Global. Companies have gone from 1,000mAh batteries to 1,500mAh, and will soon go with 2,000mAh as the standard, Oyama said. These higher-capacity batteries come at a price -- the packs often are larger.

That capacity ramp-up has worked out because manufacturers like Samsung have started making their smartphones bigger, providing more room inside for batteries. There are also extremes like Motorola's Droid Razr Maxx, which comes with a 3,300mAh battery, an 85 percent increase over the battery that shipped with the standard Droid Razr. That's been fine for something that can go into a pocket or purse, but there's a limit when it comes to a limb on the human body.

Pebble's smartwatch extends its battery time by using an e-paper display.

(Credit:
CNET)

One of the clearest examples of how well that works when scaled down is Apple's sixth-generation iPod Nano, which the company actually marketed as a watch, with built-in watch faces. Inside was a tiny 105mAh battery that was geared for 24 hours of music playback. But in day-to-day use, that ended up being just a few days if you used features like the built-in FM radio and pedometer. The latest model, released last October, did away with the watch idea completely.

Smartwatch upstarts like the Pebble, which raised more than $10 million on Kickstarter, got around this issue by going with a different screen technology that uses less power. Instead of a backlit LCD panel, Pebble went with an e-paper display and low-power Bluetooth, which together require less juice and mean that the watch can be used for up to a week between charges.

In other words, if we're expecting a large, bright LCD screen, constant connectivity, and some of the same capable innards we're getting in iPhones and iPods, we can't ignore the issue of integrating a battery large enough to keep things running.

What's now; what's next
In the world of batteries, lithium ion and lithium polymer remain the most commonly used technologies, though lithium polymer is becoming more popular.

The two technologies are similar, but the polymer version has certain benefits that have made it increasingly attractive for use in portable gadgets. Lithium polymer is more expensive than lithium ion, but is safer, and can be manufactured into a variety of different shapes. By comparison, lithium ion has been limited to cylinders or flat, rectangular boxes. This attribute has led to some of the advances in the types of form factors manufacturers have made.

"For now, the go-to for the foreseeable future will still be lithium polymer batteries," said Allan Yogasingam, a technical research manager at UBM Tech Insights. "The reason for that is that li-polymer has a strong flexibility that allows products like
tablets and notebooks and now ultrabooks to feature lighter and slimmer designs. After that, it's a bit of an 'arms race' to see which battery technology will have the most appeal to consumer electronic manufacturers."

Among the frontrunners in battery technology is lithium imide, Yogasingam said. It has higher density than the lithium polymer batteries, is more durable, and is better at recharging -- two major benefits for something that will be on the go. (Find out more about lithium imide here.)

Down the road there's also the promise of lithium air batteries. IBM has been developing lithium air batteries chiefly to power electric
cars, but such batteries should work in mobile devices after being scaled down, said Michael Karasick, vice president and director of IBM's Almaden Research Lab in San Jose, Calif. He noted that such technology will allow batteries to either be one-tenth their current size or last 10 times as long. The rub? It could take years before they're available, Karasick said.

Further on the horizon are silicon-based batteries and fuel cells, which promise to improve how batteries are built into mobile devices. Both have limitations, but researchers are working to advance the technologies enough that they can eventually be embedded into devices.

Also not to be ignored is a recent effort out of Silicon Valley called CalCharge, an accelerator of sorts that's hooking up companies that make batteries with universities working on battery technologies to come up with breakthroughs. Last week, the nearly year-old group announced plans (PDF) with San Jose State University to offer courses in battery-related technologies.

Changing how we charge
Apple's been an innovator in battery technology before. The company was aggressive in the use of nonremovable batteries in its products, beginning with the iPod, and leading to its use in notebooks, phones, and tablets. The payoff there, the company noted when unveiling its first
MacBook Pro with an integrated battery, was that it could put a larger battery pack into the same amount of space as before. And even though users were no longer able to swap it out, the 40 percent larger battery could keep the machine running longer.

Apple's done the same thing on its smartphones, choosing to make its battery packs nonremovable in the name of saving space. Its latest model, the iPhone 5, is slightly taller and ships with a 1,440mAh battery that's just a hair bigger than the 1,432mAh battery found in the smaller-screened iPhone 4S. Yet, the iPhone 5's ratings for 3G talk time and browsing over Wi-Fi are close to what they were two generations ago.

The company has shown signs of wanting to change that. In the last few years, it's filed a variety of noteworthy, battery-related patents, from hydrogen cells to a universal puck that could be used to juice up both phones and computers alike. Like all patents, it's unclear whether they'll ever end up in products, though it shows Apple is at least investigating the possibility.

The fact remains that there's only so much Apple can do with current battery technology. Industry researchers say new battery types should help extend the life of devices, but it's still likely years before those advancements hit the market.

Apple has an opportunity to do better than other smartwatches if its battery life is spectacular. The company has a track record of thinking outside the box when it comes to powering its devices, something that could help it stand apart from other wearable tech. But if it can't make that happen in time, there's a plan B.

"It's almost more about marketing and retraining the consumer than it is about improving battery life," said Donald Saxman, project analyst at Massachusetts-based tech market research firm BCC Research. "With every technology, we get incremental improvements...but any order of magnitude improvement where there's a double or 10-times improvement in battery life means we have to come up with a new approach."

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Confirmed: Dogs Sneak Food When People Aren't Looking

Many dog owners will swear their pups are up to something when out of view of watchful eyes. Shoes go missing, couches have mysterious teeth marks, and food disappears. They seem to disregard the word "no."

Now, a new study suggests dogs might understand people even better than we thought. (Related: "Animal Minds.")

The research shows that domestic dogs, when told not to snatch a piece of food, are more likely to disobey the command in a dark room than in a lit room.

This suggests that man's best friend is capable of understanding a human's point of view, said study leader Juliane Kaminski, a psychologist at the U.K.'s University of Portmouth.

"The one thing we can say is that dogs really have specialized skills in reading human communication," she said. "This is special in dogs." (Read "How to Build a Dog.")

Sneaky Canines

Kaminski and colleagues recruited 84 dogs, all of which were more than a year old, motivated by food, and comfortable with both strangers and dark rooms.

The team then set up experiments in which a person commanded a dog not to take a piece of food on the floor and repeated the commands in a room with different lighting scenarios ranging from fully lit to fully dark.

They found that the dogs were four times as likely to steal the food—and steal it more quickly—when the room was dark. (Take our dog quiz.)

"We were thinking what affected the dog was whether they saw the human, but seeing the human or not didn't affect the behavior," said Kaminski, whose study was published recently in the journal Animal Cognition.

Instead, she said, the dog's behavior depended on whether the food was in the light or not, suggesting that the dog made its decision based on whether the human could see them approaching the food.

"In a general sense, [Kaminski] and other researchers are interested in whether the dog has a theory of mind," said Alexandra Horowitz, head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard University, who was not involved in the new study.

Something that all normal adult humans have, theory of mind is "an understanding that others have different perspective, knowledge, feelings than we do," said Horowitz, also the author of Inside of a Dog.

Smarter Than We Think

While research has previously been focused on our closer relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—interest in dog cognition is increasing, thanks in part to owners wanting to know what their dogs are thinking. (Pictures: How smart are these animals?)

"The study of dog cognition suddenly began about 15 years ago," Horowitz said.

Part of the reason for that, said Brian Hare, director of the Duke Canine Cognition Lab and author of The Genius of Dogs, is that "science thought dogs were unremarkable."

But "dogs have a genius—years ago we didn't know what that was," said Hare, who was not involved in the new research. (See pictures of the the evolution of dogs, from wolf to woof.)

Many of the new dog studies are variations on research done with chimpanzees, bonobos, and even young children. Animal-cognition researchers are looking into dogs' ability to imitate, solve problems, or navigate social environments.

So just how much does your dog understand? It's much more than you—and science—probably thought.

Selectively bred as companions for thousands of years, dogs are especially attuned to human emotions—and, study leader Kaminski said, are better at reading human cues than even our closest mammalian relatives.

"There has been a physiological change in dogs because of domestication," Duke's Hare added. "Dogs want to bond with us in ways other species don't." (Related: "Dogs' Brains Reorganized by Breeding.")

While research reveals more and more insight into the minds of our furry best friends, Kaminski said, "We still don't know just how smart they are."

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Oscar Pistorius Charged With Premeditated Murder

A South Africa magistrate has charged Olympian Oscar Pistorius with a Schedule 6 offense, meaning that the alleged murder of his girlfriend was preplanned or premeditated.

Pistorius, a double-amputee who gained worldwide fame for running on carbon-fiber blades, allegedly shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, four times at his gated home in Pretoria, South Africa, Feb. 14. South African prosecutors laid out part of their case against the 26-year-old athlete at today's bail hearing.

"[Pistorius] shot and killed an innocent woman," Gerrie Nel, the senior state prosecutor, said in court, adding that there is "no possible explanation to support" the notion that Pistorius thought Steenkamp was an intruder.

PHOTOS: Paralympic Champion Charged in Killing

Police responding to neighbors' calls about shouting and gunshots at Pistorius' home in the guarded and gated complex in the South African capital discovered Steenkamp's body. A 9-mm pistol was recovered at the home.

At the hearing, for which Pistorius arrived early at the courthouse this morning in a gray suit and tie,
the state made it clear it would be asking for the alleged crime to be categorized as preplanned or premeditated.

Conflicting Theories Muddle Oscar Pistorius Murder Case Watch Video

Oscar Pistorius Allegedly Fought the Night of Shooting Watch Video

Oscar Pistorius: Possibly Incriminating Information Leaked Watch Video

Prosecutors said Steenkamp had arrived at the house with the expectation of spending the night with Pistorius. They said that Steenkamp was shot while in the bathroom, which is about 21 feet from the main bedroom, and that the two rooms are linked by a passage. The door to the toilet was broken down from the outside, prosecutors said, inferring that the bathroom door had been locked.

Prosecutors believe it's a case of premeditated murder because, they say, Pistorius had to stop, put on his prosthetic legs, grab a gun and then walk 21 feet to a bathroom.

The premeditated murder charge means that he would be sentenced to life in prison if convicted, and that he is likely to be denied bail, which is expected to be decided later today.

South Africa has moved away from the jury system, in light of its brutally racist past, so Pistorius' fate will rest in the hands of a judge and two magistrates.

The prosecution said that the defense will no doubt argue for the charge to be downgraded to a Schedule 5 murder, but that was clearly wrong, according to the prosecution.

In a Schedule 5 offense, the onus is on the prosecution to prove that it would be in the interest of justice to keep the accused behind bars and not release him on bail. A Schedule 6 offense is a more serious category, wherein the defense has to prove that it would be in the interest of justice to release the accused person on bail.

The defense made it clear today that it is going to argue that Pistorius thought a burglar was inside that bathroom. The defense said prosecutors have no way to prove that he knew who was in there, and that they are prepared to submit evidence of other men who have shot wives and children, mistaking them for burglars.

News reports in local papers have said that police are investigating whether Pistorius had an anger-management problem that led to the incident. They focused on a bloody cricket bat that might have been used when Steenkamp died.

Meanwhile, the Steenkamp family planned a private memorial service at Victoria Park crematorium in the south coast city of Port Elizabeth today. As Pistorius stood before the court, Steenkamp's body was being transported to Port Elizabeth.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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