2,657 results
- Life
Primate vision puts pieces together
Study suggests nerve cells in retinas create an intricate system of interlocking receptive fields.
- Humans
Primates get a neural facial
New brain-imaging studies indicate that similar brain areas coordinate face recognition in people, chimpanzees and macaque monkeys, suggesting that a face-sensitive brain system evolved early in primate evolution.
- Humans
Symbolic snacks
Capuchin monkeys can reason with tokens as they do with different foods, demonstrating a basic capacity for thinking symbolically.
- Animals
Tool use to crow about
A pair of new studies indicates that crows can employ tools in advanced ways, including using stones to displace water in a container and manipulating three sticks in sequence to reach food.
-
The Primate Family Tree: The Amazing Diversity of Our Closest Relatives by Ian Redmond
Firefly Books, 2008, 176 p., $35.
-
-
Aping the Stone Age
Chimp chasers join artifact extractors to probe the roots of stone tools.
- Health & Medicine
Running interference on cholesterol
Injected RNA molecule lowers LDL in rats and monkeys.
-
Science for science writers
Science News blogs from Austin, Texas, where the 47th annual New Horizons in Science meeting is taking place. Freelance Laura Beil describes how Skip Garner began his accidental journey into scientific misconduct investigation after he developed a computer program that could, as he put it, “help a physicist understand medicine,” he told writers in the audience at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing symposium. Got milk tolerance? Your ability to digest lactose as an adult is relatively new in the human species. And, said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides evidence of rapid evolution over the past 10,000 years, Elizabeth Quill reports in this blog from the meeting. Virgil Griffith’s life goal is “to create a machine who feels.” Griffith, a doctoral student at Caltech, isn’t the only one. During his talk, he revealed that turning people into cyborgs is the secret passion of many of his Caltech peers, Rachel Ehrenberg reports. (They contend that they are working on implant devices for the injured bodies of people like Vietnam vets, says Griffith, but if you get them drunk they’ll confess that the real aim is to make cyborgs of us all.) Also, blogging from: Eva Emerson on some new results on longevity without caloric restriction in yeast; freelance Susan Gaidos on a Boston University medical statistician who has devoted lots of time to studying errors in the voting process, and says things can, and do, routinely go wrong; and Lisa Grossman on how mapping fossil fuel emissions may help scientists find where carbon is hiding in the biosphere.
- Life
Birds bust a move to musical beats
Parrots and possibly other vocal-mimicking animals can synchronize their movements to a musical beat, two new studies suggest.
-
Furry Math: Macaques can do sums like people in a hurry
Macaques and college students showed similarities in performance on a computer test of split-second arithmetic, suggesting a common inheritance of the ability to do approximate math without counting.
- Health & Medicine
Brain stem cells help Parkinson’s monkeys
Transplants of human-brain stem cells triggered signs of improvement in monkeys with a Parkinson's disease–like disorder.
