pigs

People who search for human remains in Alberta say a new study identifying predominant scavengers in the region will help them conduct their searches more efficiently.In August 2021 and August 2022, researchers placed pig carcasses at four locations — one near Edmonton, another near Calgary and two in more rural areas.The 200-pound pigs acted as analogs for human remains so researchers put dresses, shorts and shirts on them."It probably looks ludicrous, but we are trying our best to recreate a human environment and if we…

Oink oink, do you care for a pig-ture perfect cup of coffee while cozying up to an adorable piglet? Then, it’s time to smash your piggy bank and fly to Japan to visit this pig cafe.For 2,200 yen ($15), customers get to spend at least 30 minutes in the company of cute little pigs at Tokyo’s Mipig Café. Due to its a-boar-able and popular nature, a reservation is required before showing up.Brad Loomis, a software engineer from Pullman, Washington, visited the capital’s unique coffee place with his 21-year-old daughter,…

Every day I rise early, like a stock trader, to start the daily business of sending and receiving adorable videos. Pigs wearing pig costumes, alien creatures spanking each other’s botties, relationship dynamics explored via gibberish, talking cats and noodly cartoons. My friends and I are in deep, but how did this happen? “Cuteness has been slowly taking over our world,” says Claire Catterall, curator of the Cute exhibition at London’s Somerset House. “It’s now accepted as one of our languages.”It’s a language that…

Good vibes can get you far, and now, they may even help you lose weight. That’s because a group of researchers and engineers have created a vibrating weight-loss pill that allows you to feel full without having to eat as much. The pill, which is called the Vibratory Ingestible BioElectronic Stimulator (VIBES), has only been tested in pigs, but it is showing very promising results.It’s kind of funny when you think about it. Of all the weight-loss options that we’ve seen being tested or marketed over the years, a…

So far this “electroceutical” has only been tested in a handful of young Yorkshire pigs, but with promising results. According to a new paper in Science Advances, the six pigs that were given the pill ate 40% less than swine that received a placebo over the course of two weeks. That’s roughly what the team expected, but “we were very surprised when it had such a consistent effect,” says Shriya Srinivasan, a biomedical engineer at Harvard and one of the study’s authors. The pigs didn’t lose weight—they were still…

In the late 1990s, a London-based research team confirmed that, in a laboratory setting at least, PERVs could infect human cells.The discovery, for a time, “killed xenotransplantation,” said Björn Petersen, a xenotransplantation researcher with the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, the German government’s animal-disease research center. “Pharmaceutical companies withdrew their money from the research.”Around the world, the hunt was on for pigs that were as disease-free as possible.In 1998, Diatranz partner Olga Garkavenko…

A hybrid cross between wild boars and domestic pigs are invading the United States. These “super pigs,” which first spread through Canada are now making their way down into the northern U.S. While it isn’t unusual for animals to cross national lines, the problem lies in the dangers that these feral swine pose to the ecosystem in the areas they are invading. The root of the problem, according to a Field and Stream report comes from the early 2000s, when farms for wild boars loosed their hybrid super pigs after…

The companies touting new chat-based artificial-intelligence systems are running a massive experiment—and we are the test subjects.In this experiment, Microsoft, MSFT -2.18% OpenAI and others are rolling out on the internet an alien intelligence that no one really understands, which has been granted the ability to influence our assessment of what’s true in the world.  This test is already happening on a global scale. More than a million people in 169 countries have been…

Wild pigs inside an enclosure in Missouri in 2019.Photo: David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch (AP)Incredibly intelligent. Jaw-droppingly massive. Able to elude predators by burrowing for hours under the snow in freezing temperatures.They may sound villainous creatures in an apocalyptic movie, but they’re actually more closely related to Babe. A new breed of wild hog is migrating south from Canada and could pose new problems for the U.S.’s burgeoning—and problematic—pig population.While pigs are not native to North…

Newcastle’s Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are an anomaly within the heavy metal universe. They’ve seemingly entranced just as many long-haired head-bangers as they have BBC Radio 6 Music listeners who think Machine Head is the name of the car dealership down the road. Perhaps it’s because their Black Sabbath-esque doom riffs make them accessible to anyone who has overlooked the past few decades worth of hard rock history. It may be due to the fact that their aggression frequently dissipates into softer psychedelia.…