“This is the first scientific study to analyze how dogs actually use soundboards,” said lead researcher Federico Rossano, associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego and director of the Comparative Cognition Lab. “The findings reveal that dogs are pressing buttons purposefully to express their desires and needs, not just imitating their owners. When dogs combine two buttons, these sequences are not random but instead seem to reflect specific requests.”

The study observed that the buttons most commonly used were related to essential needs, with words such as “outside,” “treat,” “play,” and “potty.” Notably, combinations like “outside” + “potty” or “food” + “water” were used in meaningful ways, occurring more frequently than expected by chance.

For dog owners, this research offers a new way to better understand their pets’ needs. “While dogs already communicate some of these needs,” Rossano said, “soundboards could allow for more precise communication. Instead of barking or scratching at the door, a dog may be able to tell you exactly what it wants, even combining concepts like ‘outside’ and ‘park’ or ‘beach.’ This could improve companionship and strengthen the bond between dogs and their owners.”

Data was collected via the FluentPet mobile app, where owners logged their dogs’ button presses in real time. The research team selected 152 dogs with over 200 logged button presses each to analyze patterns of use. Advanced statistical methods, including computer simulations, were used to determine whether button combinations were random, imitative, or truly intentional. The results showed that multi-button presses occurred in patterns significantly different from random chance, supporting the idea of deliberate communication.

The researchers also compared dogs’ button presses to those of their owners and found that dogs were not simply imitating human behavior. For instance, buttons like “I love you” were far less frequently pressed by dogs than by their people.

While the study provides evidence of intentional two-button combinations, the researchers aim to go further. Future investigations will explore whether dogs can use buttons to refer to the past or future — such as a missing toy — or combine buttons creatively to communicate concepts for which they lack specific words.

“We want to know if dogs can use these soundboards to express ideas beyond their immediate needs, like absent objects, past experiences, or future events,” Rossano said. “If they can, it would drastically change how we think about animal intelligence and communication.”

Rossano’s co-authors on the study are Amalia P. M. Bastos, now at Johns Hopkins University; Zachary N. Houghton, now at UC Davis; and Lucas Naranjo with CleverPet, Inc. Bastos’ work on the study was supported in part by Johns Hopkins’ Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. While Bastos and Houghton have previously served as consultants to CleverPet, and Naranjo currently works for the company, which manufactures the FluentPet mobile app and soundboard devices, the research design and analysis were conducted independently.

And researchers from the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Dental Medicine helped unearth the cave’s secrets over more than a decade of excavation.

Manot Cave was used for thousands of years as a living space for both Neanderthals and humans at different times. In 2015, researchers from Case Western Reserve helped identify a 55,000-year-old skull that provided physical evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthal and homo sapiens, with characteristics of each clearly visible in the skull fragment.

The cave’s living space was near the entrance, but in the deepest, darkest part of the cave, eight stories below, the new paper describes a large cavern with evidence it was used as a gathering space, possibly for rituals that enhanced social cohesion.

The cavern’s touchstone is an engraved rock, deliberately placed in a niche in the cavern, with a turtle-shell design carved into its surface. The three-dimensional turtle is contemporaneous with some of the oldest cave paintings in France.

“It may have represented a totem or spiritual figure,” said Omry Barzilai, Head of Material Culture PaleoLab at the University of Haifa and the Israel Antiquities Authority, who led the team. “Its special location, far from the daily activities near the cave entrance, suggests that it was an object of worship.”

The cavern has natural acoustics favorable for large gatherings, and evidence of wood ash on nearby stalagmites suggests prehistoric humans carried torches to light the chamber.

Manot Cave was discovered in 2008 by workers building condominiums in a mountain resort close to Israel’s border with Lebanon. Case Western Reserve’s School of Dental Medicine got involved in the excavation in 2012. The dean at the time, Jerold Goldberg, committed $20,000 annually for 10 years to CWRU’s Institute for the Science of Origins; the money was used to fund dental students’ summer research in Israel.

“I’m an oral and maxillofacial surgeon by training,” Goldberg said. “I provided the commitment and the money because I wanted people to understand the breadth and intellectual interest that dental schools have.”

And although not trained in archaeology, dental students can quickly identify bone fragments from rock, which makes them invaluable at excavations like Manot Cave.

“Most people would not suspect that a dental school would be involved in an archaeological excavation,” said Mark Hans, professor and chair of orthodontics at the dental school. “But one of the things that are preserved very well in ancient skeletons are teeth, because they are harder than bone. There is a whole field of dental anthropology. As an orthodontist, I am interested in human facial growth and development, which, it turns out, is exactly what is needed to identify anthropological specimens.”

For 10 years, Case Western Reserve sent 10 to 20 dental students every summer to help with the Manot Cave excavation. The summer research became so popular that students from other dental and medical schools began applying to visit Israel with the CWRU team, according to Yvonne McDermott, the project coordinator.

Case Western Reserve also collaborated closely with Linda Spurlock, a physical anthropologist at Kent State University, whose expertise is putting a face on a skull using clay to build out the tissues that would have covered the bone when the person was alive.

“One of the things I liked most about working on this excavation was how much we learned from the other researchers,” Hans said. “Everyone has a narrow focus, like mammals, uranium-dating, hearths; and we all came together and shared our knowledge. We learned a lot over 10 years.”

The Manot Cave project is supported by the Dan David Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation, the Irene Levi Sala CARE Archaeological Foundation and the Leakey Foundation. The research also involved experts from the Israel Antiquities Authority, Cleveland State University, the Geological Survey of Israel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Haifa, Tel Aviv University, Ben-Gurion University, the University of Vienna, the University of Barcelona, the University of Siena and Simon Fraser University.

Almost always, battery scientists and engineers have tested the cycle lives of new battery designs in laboratories using a constant rate of discharge followed by recharging. They repeat this cycle rapidly many times to learn quickly if a new design is good or not for life expectancy, among other qualities.

This is not a good way to predict the life expectancy of EV batteries, especially for people who own EVs for everyday commuting, according to the study published Dec. 9 in Nature Energy. While battery prices have plummeted about 90% over the past 15 years, batteries still account for almost a third of the price of a new EV. So, current and future EV commuters may be happy to

“We’ve not been testing EV batteries the right way;’ said Simona Onori, senior author and an associate professor of energy science and engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “To our surprise, real driving with frequent acceleration, braking that charges the batteries a bit, stopping to pop into a store, and letting the batteries rest for hours at a time, helps batteries last longer than we had thought based on industry standard lab tests.”

A pleasant surprise

The researchers designed four types of EV discharge profiles, from the standard constant discharge to dynamic discharging based on real driving data. The research team tested 92 commercial lithium ion batteries for more than two years across the discharge profiles. In the end, the more realistically the profiles reflected actual driving behavior, the higher EV life expectancy climbed.

Several factors contribute to the unexpected longevity, the study finds. A machine learning algorithm trained on all the data the team collected helped tease out the impacts of dynamic discharge profiles on battery degradation.

For example, the study showed a correlation between sharp, short EV accelerations and slower degradation. This was contrary to long-held assumptions of battery researchers, including this study’s team, that acceleration peaks are bad for EV batteries.

Pressing the pedal with your foot hard does not speed up aging. If anything, it slows it down, explained Alexis Geslin, one of three lead authors of the study and a PhD student in materials science and engineering and in computer science in Stanford’s School of Engineering.

Two ways to age

The research team also looked for differences in battery aging due to many charge-discharge cycles versus battery aging that just comes with time. Your batteries at home that have been sitting unused in a drawer for years will not operate as well as when you bought them, if they work at all.

“We battery engineers have assumed that cycle aging is much more important than time-induced aging. That’s mostly true for commercial EVs like buses and delivery vans that are almost always either in use or being recharged,” said Geslin. “For consumers using their EVs to get to work, pick up their kids, go to the grocery store, but mostly not using them or even charging them, time becomes the predominant cause of aging over cycling.”

The study identifies an average discharge rate sweet spot for balancing time aging and cycle aging, at least for the commercial battery they tested. Luckily, that window is in the range of realistic consumer EV driving. Carmakers could update their EV battery management software to take advantage of the new findings and to maximize battery longevity under real-world conditions.

Looking ahead

“Going forward, evaluating new battery chemistries and designs with realistic demand profiles will be really important,” said energy science and engineering postdoctoral scholar Le Xu. “Researchers can now revisit presumed aging mechanisms at the chemistry, materials, and cell levels to deepen their understanding. This will facilitate the development of advanced control algorithms that optimize the use of existing commercial battery architectures.”

The implications extend beyond batteries, the study suggests. Scientists and engineers could apply the principles to other energy storage applications, as well as to other materials and devices in physical sciences in which aging is crucial, like plastics, glasses, solar cells, and some biomaterials used in implants.

“This work highlights the power of integrating multiple areas of expertise — from materials science, control, and modeling to machine learning- to advance innovation,” Onori said.