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The combination of highly controlled experimental testing and the voluntary participation of unrestrained animals has many advantages over traditional, laboratory-based learning environments in terms of animal welfare, learning speed, and resource economy. Such automatic learning environments have recently been developed for primates (Fagot & Bonté, 2010; Fagot & Paleressompoulle, 2009;) but, so far, has not been achieved with highly mobile creatures such as birds. Here, we present a novel testing environment for pigeons. Living together in small groups in outside aviaries, they can freely choose to participate in learning experiments by entering and leaving the automatic learning box at any time. At the single-access entry, they are individualized using radio frequency identification technology and then trained or tested in a stress-free and self-terminating manner. The voluntary nature of their participation according to their individual biorhythm guarantees high motivation levels and good learning and test performance. Around-the-clock access allows for massed-trials training, which in baboons has been proven to have facilitative effects on discrimination learning. The performance of 2 pigeons confirmed the advantages of the automatic learning device for birds box. The latter is the result of a development process of several years that required us to deal with and overcome a number of technical challenges: (1) mechanically controlled access to the box, (2) identification of the birds, (3) the release of a bird and, at the same time, prevention of others from entering the box, and (4) reliable functioning of the device despite long operation times and exposure to high dust loads and low temperatures.

Purpose: Studies of smoking and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) have yielded inconsistent results, possibly due to subtype heterogeneity and/or genetic variation impacting the metabolism of tobacco-derived carcinogens, including substrates of the N-acetyltransferase enzymes NAT1 and NAT2., Methods: We conducted a pooled analysis of 5,026 NHL cases and 4,630 controls from seven case-control studies in the international lymphoma epidemiology consortium to examine associations between smoking, variation in the N-acetyltransferase genes NAT1 and NAT2, and risk of NHL subtypes. Smoking data were harmonized across studies, and genetic variants in NAT1 and NAT2 were used to infer acetylation phenotype of the NAT1 and NAT2 enzymes, respectively. Pooled odds ratios (ORs) and 95 % confidence intervals (95 % CIs) for risk of NHL and subtypes were calculated using joint fixed effects unconditional logistic regression models., Results: Current smoking was associated with a significant 30 % increased risk of follicular lymphoma (n = 1,176) but not NHL overall or other NHL subtypes. The association was similar among NAT2 slow (OR 1.36; 95 % CI 1.07-1.75) and intermediate/rapid (OR 1.27; 95 % CI 0.95-1.69) acetylators (p (interaction) = 0.82) and also did not differ by NAT1*10 allelotype. Neither NAT2 phenotype nor NAT1*10 allelotype was associated with risk of NHL overall or NHL subtypes., Conclusion: The current findings provide further evidence for a modest association between current smoking and follicular lymphoma risk and suggest that this association may not be influenced by variation in the N-acetyltransferase enzymes.