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POPSStephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution" The best part of the article: ""By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA." :)
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POPSSwamp Gorillas Perform Hand Clapping Ritual more (at source): "The sound was always two rapidly consecutive beats and the sound does carry within the rainforest, much like a gorilla chest beat," added Kalan, a researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Geography at Oxford Brookes University.
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POPS Orangutan ruse misleads predators more: Co-author Madeleine Hardus, from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, told BBC News: "This study clearly indicates that the abilities of great ape communication have been traditionally undervalued and that there may be traces of language precursors in our closest relatives, the great apes." She added that the findings suggest that primate calling behaviour is not purely based on instinct, but instead is socially learned.
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POPSAnother Great Escape The funniest thing in this video is the people's laughing in the background. They really sound like apes and monkeys don't they?
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POPSMJ chimp! We have not said anything to Bubble about Michael's death. Excuse me, but isn't "Bubbles" an ape???!!! I am a bit lost here, do they think that apes will understand this trauma?!
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POPSour missing chromosomes we have 46- our nearest ape relatives have 48- which led to the question- how could we have a common ancestor with great apes, but fewer chromosomes? They are not missing....they just fused, and have been found
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POPSHow Darwin aped Da Vinci Charles Darwin shocked the world by declaring humans and apes related – an idea Leonardo da Vinci had 350 years earlier
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POPSStop the Trade This subject is so distasteful, I really don't want to comment on it, but I feel that I must say something.*Go to the website to view these* Watch the videos, decide what you think you should do to stop this barbaric practice. And yes American money is involved. Maybe these creatures would be safer locked up in a zoo.
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POPSThe Creative Personality " Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. What makes us different from apes—our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology—is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning."
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POPSEgalitarian revolution in the Pleistocene? In humans, a secondary transition from egalitarian societies to hierarchical states took place as the first civilizations were emerging. How can it be understood in terms of the model discussed? One can speculate that technological and cultural advances made the coalition size much less important in controlling the outcome of a conflict than the individuals' ability to directly control and use resources (e.g. weapons, information, food) that strongly influence the outcomes of conflicts.
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POPSCrows make monkeys out of chimps in mental test To investigate further, the team presented the crows with a wooden table, divided into two compartments. A treat was at the end of each compartment, but in one, it was positioned behind a rectangular trap hole. To get the snack, the crow had to consistently choose to retrieve food from the compartment without the hole. A recent study of great apes found they could not transfer success at the trap-tube to success at the trap-table. The three crows could, however.
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POPSCrows smarter than Chimpanzees Not-so great apes To investigate further, the team presented the crows with a wooden table, divided into two compartments. A treat was at the end of each compartment, but in one, it was positioned behind a rectangular trap hole. To get the snack, the crow had to consistently choose to retrieve food from the compartment without the hole. A recent study of great apes found they could not transfer success at the trap-tube to success at the trap-table. The three crows could, however. "They seem to have some kind of concept of a hole that isn't tied to purely visual features, and they can use this concept to figure out the novel problem," Taylor says. "This is the most conclusive evidence to date for causal reasoning in an animal." Three of the crows did fail at both tasks, however. The team plans further work to investigate why. Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1107)
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POPSChurch apologises to Charles Darwin over theory of evolution But Dr Brown says everyone makes mistakes, the church included. "When a big new idea emerges that changes the way people look at the world, it's easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty, is under attack and then to do battle against the new insights,'' he writes.
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POPSWild orangutans treat pain with natural anti-inflammatory After using the leaves, the orangutan dropped them, allowing Morrogh-Bernard and her assistant to find out what they were. The leaves belong to a genus called Commelina, a group of plants that orangutans do not eat as part of their normal diet. However, local indigenous people know the plant well, grinding it into a balm and applying it to their skin to treat muscular pain, sore bones and swellings.