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New Study: Dogs Don't Understand Humans as Well as it Was Thought

Dogs wait for an examination at an MR scanner at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, Feb/ 11, 2016. (AFP Photo)
Dogs wait for an examination at an MR scanner at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, Feb/ 11, 2016. (AFP Photo)
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New Study: Dogs Don't Understand Humans as Well as it Was Thought

Dogs wait for an examination at an MR scanner at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, Feb/ 11, 2016. (AFP Photo)
Dogs wait for an examination at an MR scanner at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, Feb/ 11, 2016. (AFP Photo)

Despite dogs' excellent hearing and ability to analyze and process different speech sounds, a new study led by researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest indicates that dogs fail to distinguish subtle variances between similar-sounding words.

The number of words dogs can learn to recognize remains very low even when they live with humans and are exposed to human speech. Researchers suggest that although dogs have human-like hearing abilities, they might be less capable of coping with nuances between words.

In the study published on December 9 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the researchers tested this idea. They developed a procedure for measuring electrical activity in the brain of untrained family dogs. The researchers invited dogs and their owners to the lab. After the dog became familiar with the room and the experimenters, the experimenters asked the owner to sit down on a mattress together with her dog to relax. Then, they put electrodes on the dog's head and fixed it with a tape. The dogs then listened to tape-recorded instruction words they knew (e.g., "sit"), to similar but nonsense words (e.g., "sut"), and to very different nonsense words (e.g., "bep").

The analysis of the recorded electric brain activity showed that dog brains clearly and quickly discriminated the known words from the very different nonsense words starting from 200 ms after the beginning of the words. This effect is in line with similar studies on humans showing that the human brain responds differently to meaningful and nonsense words already within a few hundred milliseconds.

But the dogs' brains made no differentiation between known words and those nonsense words that differed in a single speech sound only. This pattern is more similar to the results of experiments with human infants. Infants become efficient in processing phonetic details of words, which is an important prerequisite for developing a large vocabulary.

"But it seems that dogs do not overcome this phase, as they might not attend to all speech sounds forming words. This might also be a factor in why dogs tend to learn only a limited amount of human words, and could mean that they don't understand humans as much as humans might think. Similar-sounding words could be tripping them up, being perceived in their brains as the same thing," said Attila Andics, the study's principal investigator in a report published on the university website.

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Varieties

Heavy Rains Drench Southern California, Spawn Flash Flooding, Mud Flows

A car sits buried in mud after flooding Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025, in Wrightwood, Calif. (AP)
A car sits buried in mud after flooding Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025, in Wrightwood, Calif. (AP)
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Heavy Rains Drench Southern California, Spawn Flash Flooding, Mud Flows

A car sits buried in mud after flooding Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025, in Wrightwood, Calif. (AP)
A car sits buried in mud after flooding Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025, in Wrightwood, Calif. (AP)

Torrential rains unleashed widespread flash flooding and mud flows across Southern California on Wednesday, as authorities warned motorists to stay off roads while urging residents in flood zones to evacuate or shelter in place.

In the rain-soaked mountain resort of Wrightwood, east of Los Angeles, emergency crews spent much of the day answering dozens of rescue calls and pulling drivers to safety from submerged vehicles, San Bernardino County Fire Department spokesperson Christopher Prater said.

No casualties were reported as ‌of Wednesday night, according ‌to Prater.

Aerial video footage posted online by the fire department ‌showed ⁠rivers of ‌mud coursing through inundated cabin neighborhoods.

Downpours measuring an inch (2.54 cm) or more of rain an hour in some areas were spawned by the region's latest atmospheric storm, a vast airborne current of dense moisture siphoned from the Pacific and swept inland over the greater Los Angeles area.

The Christmas Eve storm was expected to persist into Friday, posing unsafe driving conditions during what would normally be a busy holiday travel period, according to the US National Weather Service.

"Life-threatening" storm conditions ⁠were expected to persist through Christmas Day over Southern California, "where widespread flash flooding is underway," the weather service said.

A flash-flood ‌warning was posted across much of Los Angeles County until ‍6 p.m. PST, urging motorists: "Do not ‍attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area, subject to flooding or under ‍an evacuation order."

Los Angeles city officials urged residents to heed evacuation orders issued for about 130 homes considered especially vulnerable to mudslides and debris flows in areas where last year's wildfires ravaged the community of Pacific Palisades.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department issued an evacuation warning for Wrightwood earlier in the day, but elevated the advisory to a shelter-in-place order as flood conditions worsened. The Angeles Crest Highway, a major traffic route through the San ⁠Gabriel Mountains, was closed in two stretches due to flooding

Wednesday's heavy rainfall was accompanied by strong, gusty winds that officials said were downing trees and power lines. In upper elevations of the Sierra mountains, the storm was expected to dump heavy snow.

NWS meteorologist Ariel Cohen said 4 to 8 inches of rain had fallen in some foothill areas by 9 a.m. PST, and the Los Angeles City News Service reported numerous rockslides in the mountains. Forecasts called for more than a foot (30.48 cm) of rain falling over some lower-terrain mountain areas by week's end.

Forecasters even issued a rare tornado warning for a small portion of east-central Los Angeles County due to heavy thunderstorm activity over the community of Alhambra.

As of Wednesday night, ‌rainfall over the region had subsided, but a second wave of the storm system was due to hit on Thursday, forecasters said.

Varieties

China's LandSpace Hopes to Complete Rocket Recovery in Mid-2026

Zhuque-3 rocket by China’s private rocket firm LandSpace, takes off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China, December 3, 2025, in this screengrab taken from handout drone footage provided by LandSpace. LandSpace/Handout via REUTERS
Zhuque-3 rocket by China’s private rocket firm LandSpace, takes off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China, December 3, 2025, in this screengrab taken from handout drone footage provided by LandSpace. LandSpace/Handout via REUTERS
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China's LandSpace Hopes to Complete Rocket Recovery in Mid-2026

Zhuque-3 rocket by China’s private rocket firm LandSpace, takes off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China, December 3, 2025, in this screengrab taken from handout drone footage provided by LandSpace. LandSpace/Handout via REUTERS
Zhuque-3 rocket by China’s private rocket firm LandSpace, takes off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China, December 3, 2025, in this screengrab taken from handout drone footage provided by LandSpace. LandSpace/Handout via REUTERS

Chinese rocket developer LandSpace plans to successfully recover a reusable booster in mid-2026, a company executive said in an interview, underscoring the Beijing-based firm's ambition to become China's answer to SpaceX.

The ability to return, recover, and reuse a rocket's engine-packed first stage, or booster, after launch is crucial to reducing costs and making it easier for countries to send satellites into orbit, and to turn space exploration into a commercially viable business similar to civil aviation, Reuters reported.

Earlier this month, privately-owned LandSpace ‌became the first ‌Chinese entity to conduct a full reusable rocket ‌test, when ⁠Zhuque-3 ​blasted off ‌from a remote area in northwest China for its maiden flight, drawing comparisons to US aerospace giant SpaceX.

SECOND ATTEMPT PLANNED

While LandSpace failed to complete the crucial final step of landing and recovering the rocket's engine-packed booster, it hopes to clear this challenge in mid-2026 with a second test flight, Zhuque-3 deputy chief designer Dong Kai told Chinese podcast Tech Early Know in an interview published on Tuesday.

"If the second flight's recovery (stage) succeeds, we ⁠plan that on the fourth flight we will use a reused first stage to launch," Dong said.

So far, ‌the only company that has mastered reusable rocket technology is ‍SpaceX, founded by the world's richest ‍person Elon Musk. SpaceX's Falcon 9 launches around 150 times a year, or roughly ‍three times per week, with its booster reused dozens of times if necessary.

Musk said in October that LandSpace's Zhuque-3 design could allow it to beat the Falcon 9, but went on to state that the Chinese challenger's launch cadence would take more than five years to ​reach that of SpaceX's workhorse model, at which point the US firm would have transitioned to its heavier, new-generation model Starship and "doing over ⁠100 times the annual payload to orbit of Falcon".

INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING

LandSpace's Dong said that, while the company was already building an engine for a future Starship-like model, he was not optimistic that in five years Falcon 9's work rate could be surpassed, noting that all rocket models in China combined this year totalled only around 100 launches.

"It's very difficult for a single company to reach that kind of frequency. It requires the support of an entire ecosystem," Dong said, adding that LandSpace had 10 launches planned next year for all its models.

Other executives have previously said that the financial cost of a high-frequency testing and launch regimen was crucial to SpaceX's success, and that LandSpace's only ‌hope of amassing enough funds to sustain a similar programme would be by tapping China's capital markets, pointing to plans for an initial public offering next year.

 

 

Varieties

Russia Plans a Nuclear Power Plant on the Moon within a Decade

November's full moon, also known as Beaver Moon, rises over Fort-de-France in the French overseas island of Martinique, on November 5, 2025. (AFP)
November's full moon, also known as Beaver Moon, rises over Fort-de-France in the French overseas island of Martinique, on November 5, 2025. (AFP)
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Russia Plans a Nuclear Power Plant on the Moon within a Decade

November's full moon, also known as Beaver Moon, rises over Fort-de-France in the French overseas island of Martinique, on November 5, 2025. (AFP)
November's full moon, also known as Beaver Moon, rises over Fort-de-France in the French overseas island of Martinique, on November 5, 2025. (AFP)

Russia plans to put ​a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space program and a joint Russian-Chinese research station as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite.

Ever since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space in 1961, Russia has prided itself as ‌a leading power in ‌space exploration, but in recent ‌decades ⁠it ​has fallen ‌behind the United States and increasingly China.

Russia's ambitions suffered a massive blow in August 2023 when its unmanned Luna-25 mission smashed into the surface of the moon while attempting to land, and Elon Musk has revolutionized the launch of space vehicles - once a Russian specialty.

Russia's state space corporation, Roscosmos, ⁠said in a statement that it planned to build a lunar power ‌plant by 2036 and signed a contract ‍with the Lavochkin Association ‍aerospace company to do it.

Roscosmos said the purpose of ‍the plant was to power Russia's lunar program, including rovers, an observatory and the infrastructure of the joint Russian-Chinese International Lunar Research Station.

"The project is an important step towards the creation of ​a permanently functioning scientific lunar station and the transition from one-time missions to a long-term lunar exploration program," ⁠Roscosmos said.

Roscosmos did not say explicitly that the plant would be nuclear but it said the participants included Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute, Russia's leading nuclear research institute.

The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Bakanov, said in June that one of the corporation's aims was to put a nuclear power plant on the moon and to explore Venus, known as earth's "sister" planet.

The moon, which is 384,400 km (238,855 miles) from our planet, moderates the earth's wobble ‌on its axis, which ensures a more stable climate. It also causes tides in the world's oceans.