There's an old joke that we end up looking like our dogs - same nose, same hair, same weary look by Friday. Love one long enough and it stops being a joke. But a new study hints the bond runs deeper than the mirror: your dog may be reading your face far more closely than we thought. Every owner suspects it - the way a dog knows when you're only pretending to be cross, softening the second you smile. Science had mostly credited the treat jar: we're told dogs read our routines, pockets and tone, and that faces are a human obsession. This says otherwise.

Researchers at the University of Vienna trained eight patient dogs to lie still in a scanner - ear protection on - and look at photographs of strangers' faces. A happy face activated areas involved in social understanding and reached into the brain's reward machinery - the circuitry that fires for the things a dog values. It's early days and small: a few very trained dogs, photos of strangers, and -the scientists are careful - a brain lighting up isn't a heart feeling something. But the direction is lovely. "It suggests that happy human faces may have emotional significance for dogs," says researcher Laura Cuaya.


So go on - smile at your dog, for no reason, more often than dinnertime strictly requires. It costs nothing and needs no training. You might even start to look alike - and if you watch closely, you might just catch them smiling back.

The chair was setting your mood

"Sit up straight" has had a hard century. It was your mother's line about your back; then it was "power posing"; then that was quietly debunked, and we all sank back into the sofa feeling vindicated. So here's a kinder idea.

Researchers at McGill University stopped ordering people into poses - the flaw in the old studies - and let the furniture do the work. They told almost 200 volunteers they were testing an app, propped the screen high for some, low for others, and filmed who slumped. The ones nudged upright, never told posture was the point, came away feeling more pride - small effects, the researchers stress, but real, and no willpower required.

This isn't an order to sit up straight - least of all if a back, a hip or arthritis makes "straight" a painful ask, in which case your chair is your own business. It's gentler than that: the low sofa, the laptop on your knees, the kitchen chair that folds you forward may be quietly setting a mood you've been blaming on yourself. If you'd like a little more, two things you can do without leaving the seat. Roll the shoulders back, draw the blades together, hold for a breath, release. Then sit tall and ease the chin back, undoing the phone-lean. Nothing that hurts - and if a back or hip makes you unsure, ask your GP first. The simplest win is still the chair itself. Swap a slumpy seat for one that sits you up. No gym, no willpower, and it might quietly lift the afternoon.

Credits: Pexels; Author: olia-danilevich;

Full-fat dairy and the sums we got wrong

Somewhere in the last thirty years, most of us learned to treat the good cheese as a small sin - and swapped the proper yoghurt for the diet one with the slim person on the label.

A twelve-week Canadian trial suggests the arithmetic deserves another look. University of Toronto researchers asked 74 adults to add three daily servings of full-fat dairy - milk, Greek yoghurt, cheese - to their diets. Some also cut calories; one group got no calorie restriction at all. Worth saying plainly: the work was funded under a dairy-industry-linked research programme, though the paper states the funders had no role in the study - and it ran smaller than planned. What happened?

Nothing alarming, which is the news. Cholesterol didn't move. Blood sugar didn't move. Weight barely moved, even in the group given no calorie restriction. The dairy eaters also lifted their calcium and protein intake - two things many diets quietly fall short on. The researchers' suggested explanation has a lovely name - the "dairy matrix": dairy fat arrives bound up with protein and calcium, and a food doesn't always behave like the sum of its parts.

It didn't prove full-fat was better than low-fat; it found that adding it didn't produce the harm many people would expect. It's one small trial, three months long, in adults living with overweight or obesity - a reason for curiosity, not a rewrite of anyone's doctor's orders. If you've been told to watch saturated fat, this changes nothing. But if you've been apologising to the queijo fresco, or taking your café com leite with a side of guilt, the science suggests the transgression may never have been one. Nobody is telling you to eat more cheese. They're saying the sums we were all doing in the dairy aisle may have been the wrong ones.