As some of the world’s last laboratory chimpanzees retire to sanctuaries, a specialist in evolutionary psychiatry suggests treatment for our captive kin.

Muséum de Toulouse/Wikimedia Commons

Twelve birds lie belly-up in a wooden drawer at the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Bloated with stuffing, their ruddy brown chests resemble a row of sweet potatoes. Slate-blue heads and thin white tails protrude in perfect alignment, except for one bird that cranes its neck to face its neighbor. A pea-sized bulge of white cotton sits where its eye should be. A slip of paper tied to its foot reads, “Ectopistes migratorius. Manitoba. 1884.” This is the passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird in North America. When Europeans first landed on the continent, they encountered billions of the birds. By 1914 they were extinct.

That may be about to change. Today scientists are meeting in Washington, D.C. to discuss a plan to bring the passenger pigeon back from extinction. The technical challenges are immense, and the ethical questions are slippery. But as genetic technology races ahead, a scenario that’s hard to imagine is becoming harder to dismiss out of hand.

Read the full article at Wired.com

Read the full article at Living Green Magazine

Crows may be imagining more than we imagined. New research suggests certain crows make decisions based on factors they can’t see. A recent study published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS) deepens our understanding of these crafty corvids, and could help explain how human reasoning evolved.

Crows are intelligent problem solvers, capable of making hook-shaped tools to retrieve food and using multiple tools in a logical sequence. New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) are particularly adept tool users, and have often been the subject of cognitive research. In this study, the New Zealand–based researchers tested whether New Caledonian crows could trace an event back to a cause that was hidden from their view.

Read the full article at Mongabay.com

“Nobody knows the remarkable properties of human skin like the researchers struggling to emulate it. Not only is our skin sensitive – sending the brain precise information about pressure and temperature – but it also heals efficiently to preserve a protective barrier against the world. Combining these two features in a single synthetic material presented an exciting challenge for Stanford chemical engineering Professor Zhenan Bao and her team.

Now, they have succeeded in making the first material that can both sense subtle pressure and heal itself when torn or cut. Their findings will be published Nov. 11 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.”

Read it at Stanford Engineering

Read the full article at ScienceNOW

“For every type of particle in the universe, there is a partner particle. It has a different spin, but interacts similarly with the particles around it. For Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams, the theory of supersymmetry isn’t a bad analogy for marriage.

The UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist and his wife, a writer, musician and cultural philosopher, have spent 36 years joining forces to explain what’s going on in the universe.”

Read the full article at the Santa Cruz Sentinel