Soon, teaching your dog to ‘speak’ will be obsolete. They will be able to communicate verbally in English, Spanish, French and even Mandarin. They will wear EEG-style headgear. This is the vision of the Swedish research lab NSID and their post-apocalyptic dog translator No More Woof.

Okay, so the concept isn’t that stark, and it’s one that holds more ground than one would think. In fact, it started out as a kind of joke between NMW project director Tomas Mazetti and his brother. The two wondered what would happen if the consumer-level EEG Epoc was used on their mother’s dog. It was an idea that piqued enough curiosity for Mazetti to order one. Sure enough, brainwaves were produced. “It’s not that complicated,” Mazetti said in an interview with FastCoDesign. “If a dog is really calm, sleepy, or upset, that is extremely easy to see.”

Testing then began at NSID labs, where the EEG was hooked up to an inexpensive processor and portable speaker. It was developed enough for the team to start an Indigogo campaign. No More Woof is still purely in research phase, but a release date has been set for donors.

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A recent study has shown that canines are magnetically sensitive. Now, before you go sticking refrigerator magnets to your dog, it isn’t that simple (or cool). In an abstract from Frontiers in Zoology, a conclusion was made that “magnetic sensitivity was proved in dogs.”

Over a two-year span, the defecation and urinary patterns of 70 dogs from 37 breeds was studied. The observers noted that when the magnetic field (MF) was stable, the “body axis” of the dogs during waste elimination was often parallel with the magnified North-south axis. When unstable, this behavior was not present.

“Magnetic alignment is a suitable paradigm to scan for the occurrence of magnetosensitivity…to the understanding of the mechanism of magnetoreception and identify further functions of magnetosensation apart from navigation.” A predictable pattern of the dogs’ behavior was proven during MF fluctuations. The study was the first time distinguishable behavior changes were noted in a mammal during the earth’s MF fluctuations.

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