If your dog is misbehaving, you might want to spray it with pig pheromones.

Androstenone is found in boar saliva and helps induce sows to mate. Now it is the active ingredient in a spray marketed as being able to calm boisterous dogs.

of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, who studies animal behaviour, discovered androstenone’s effect by trying it on his own pet. “My dog was barking and I sprayed it and he stopped,” he says. “It’s quite a serendipitous finding.”

Intrigued, McGlone developed the pheromone as a training tool. He sprayed dogs using an aerosol containing androstenone, while simultaneously exposing them to a loud noise that would normally frighten and excite them. Compared to a spray of alcohol and noise alone, the androstenone was better at keeping dogs calm. The dogs’ heart rates did not increase when androstenone was used, indicating they were not scared.

McGlone has since worked with pet care company Sergeant’s to .

Androstenone is not the first pheromone marketed to calm an excitable pup. Dog Appeasing Pheromone (DAP) is sold in time-release collars, and supposedly mimics the smell a nursing mother gives off to her pups.

It is not clear how the pig pheromone affects dogs. “The dogs stopped barking, that was observed. But whether it has anything to do with androstenone being a pig pheromone, I think that’s open,” says neuroscientist of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri.

“I don’t really know how it works, that’s the honest answer,” says McGlone.

Journal reference:

WITH its bleepy sound effects and cheery music, Xylem draws me into the puzzle without giving away its secret. A bit like the plot of the recent movie Ender’s Game, my solutions are helping the US military, or at least its research arm, DARPA.

One of commissioned by the agency, Xylem hides mathematical teasers inside the story of a botanist identifying flowers on a pristine island. In another game, Storm Bound, I play a fearless “Golamancer”, fighting to turn a magic storm against itself by finding patterns in runes.

Launched last week, the games use a player’s actions to find security loopholes in anything from internet infrastructure to military software.

The simplest way to check software for bugs is to give it a bunch of commands and see if something goes wrong. Anything a programmer doesn’t think to check might not be working right, leaving a hole a hacker could wiggle into. The best way to do this is by checking if all of the code’s underlying logic is sound, a process called formal verification. It’s a lot more effective than trial and error.

Using the crowd to find patterns within sets of data has grown significantly since the success of Foldit, which recruited people online to decode protein structures. “My vision is that, while people are waiting for the bus, they are proving my software correct,” says Michael Ernst, one of the scientists behind the game Flow Jam. “They do it because it’s more fun than waiting for the bus, and to improve the software that runs the internet, research institutions and industry.”

In Flow Jam, players sort through tangles of pipes and boxes arranged in messy, imperfect circuits. In the process of solving these puzzles they are also looking for holes in sign-up forms and other places where users put information into a database.

“The recent deployment of [in the US] showed that validating code before it goes live is necessary and difficult,” says Sabine Hauert, who works on crowdsourcing nanotechnology problems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The game developers managed to entirely hide the tedious aspects behind fun games that feel like brain-teasers.”

“The game developers managed to entirely hide the tedious aspects of testing behind fun games”

Both Xylem and Storm Bound analyse loops, bits of code that call for some repetitive action. For every input, there should be a definite output, so if you’re walking, for example, your right foot always moves after your left – the two steps make one loop. Formal verification of these loops calls for creative mathematical models called loop invariants. In a loop with two steps, left should invariably equal right. If the equation doesn’t hold true, there’s a coding error. This generally requires human insight, rather than brute computer strength.

“People are good at seeing patterns and coming up with creative solutions. Software that automatically tries to find loop invariants takes a scattershot approach,” said Heather Logas, Xylem‘s lead designer. “Humans actually notice what’s happening with the loops. They mix and match the tools they have in ways a computer can’t.”

The games aren’t perfect. None of them are simple to play, and the training rounds are complicated and can be confusing. But the underlying concept is a leap forward for software verification. “It’s audacious to claim that game players who know nothing about programming can do a better job than today’s highly sophisticated automated program analysis tools,” Ernst said. “I’m still amazed that this idea can work at all.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Play games for The Man”

A CHAINSAW revs in a remote swathe of the Indonesian rainforest. Within minutes, rangers appear as if from nowhere, stopping illegal loggers in their tracks and saving countless trees. How did they know? A tip off from a recycled cellphone hanging hundreds of metres away in the forest.

That’s the vision of , founder of , based in San Francisco. The non-profit organisation is launching a pilot project this month in the forests of Indonesia that uses modified Android smartphones to record and identify the sound-signatures of chainsaws.

At first, Rainforest Connection will use new phones donated for the trial, though White ultimately plans to use recycled handsets that supporters contribute when they upgrade to the latest model. The phones are outfitted with solar panels specifically designed to take advantage of the brief periods when light reaches the forest floor. Their microphones stay on at all times, and software listens for the telltale growl of a chainsaw, which triggers an alert.

Initially, only rangers will be notified, but White hopes to release a free app that lets anyone receive real-time alerts with the audio that the phones pick up and the location. “We want to make people feel like they are taking part in the dramatic events on the front lines of environmental protection,” he says.

Current efforts to stop loggers in Indonesia are limited. “We can find out how much forest has been cut using satellite images, but we find out after, so we cannot trace when it happens,” says Dwiati Novita Rini, who works on reforestation of cleared land in Sumatra with Birdlife International. Conservation groups can also pay police to perform aerial surveys of areas vulnerable to logging, but they are too expensive to do frequently.

For its initial trial, Rainforest Connection will work with the conservation group to place and test 15 phone rigs in the 25,000-hectare Air Tarusan reserve in western Sumatra. White hopes each phone will have a listening radius of 0.5 kilometres, providing a low-cost way to monitor remote stretches of jungle.

Indonesia loses more than a million hectares of forest a year, according to an estimate by Rainforest Action Network. The country’s rainforest is the third largest in the world, and home to many unique native species of plants and animals. But more than half of it has been cleared since the 1960s.

Eventually, White hopes to simplify the technology so that locals can plug a phone into a box, nail it to a tree, and begin tracking loggers right away. “We’ll ultimately rely upon locals to intervene when an ‘event’ is detected. Making it simple, effective and accessible for them is our first priority.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Trunk call to save forest”