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Anyone who has a dog already knows this.  But now scientists are copping to the fact. Dogs get jealous . Sadly, I've never had a dog (hope to get one soon).  But from knowing friends' dogs, it's obvious that they get sad, and depressed and excited, just like we do (only, we don't wag our tails!). "Emotion researchers" have been arguing for years whether jealousy requires complex cognition, newswise.com reports. And some scientists have even said that jealousy is an entirely social construct – not seen in all human cultures and not fundamental or hard-wired in the same ways that fear and anger are. But the new findings support the view that there may be a more basic form of jealousy, which evolved to protect social bonds from interlopers, according to the Web site. They show that dogs exhibit more jealous behaviors, like snapping and pushing at their owner or the rival, when the owner showed affection to what appeared to be another dog (actual...

I found this pretty amazing.  There's a poet lurking in almost every physician. According to newswise.com,  future physician Paul Rocco Allegra had this to say after encountering death in the anatomy lab, where he and his classmates dissected cadavers. Metal gurney against preserved flesh, maybe this isn’t the first time we’ve met … And this,  in imagining fleeting moments when, in life, the person whose corpse lies before him, might have crossed paths with him.  I hesitate to look at your face, because maybe, just maybe, you’ve looked at mine. The Web site quotes  Allegra, who says, “You see painted fingernails, or freckles or hair,” haunting signs that this preserved mass of organic material was once a person – a human being like him. “You need to stop and reflect and analyze, and poetry does that.” Writes another student,  My pronunciations are shameful. Erythematous. Blah. My cheeks burn. Will patients call me doctor if ...

What do kids do about 300-400 times a day, women 62, and men just eight?  No, it's not burp or something else disgusting.  It's smile. And according to author Marianne LaFrance, how someone smiles can be a key predictor of what kind of person they are. Amanda Cuda of The Advocate (Stamford, CT) interviewed LaFrance, author of "Why Smile," who said that smiles can be fake or genuine, and here's how you can tell.  "A genuine smile doesn't just use the mouth. It uses the mouth and the muscles around eye. But a whole host of other cues are involved as well," LaFrance told Cuda. "Fake smiles tend to snap on the face and go off the face as quickly as they got there. When someone smiles quickly, you have an intuitive sense that something is not right there." LaFrance added that when people" have all teeth all the time,' that suggests it's not a genuine smile. So why should we care?  LaFrance told Cuda that smiles are import...