This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Gearing up for happiness — … The news headline says it all: “Toyota has built an EV with a fake transmission, and we’ve driven it – Five minutes behind the wheel, and you’ll be a believer.” This is […]
The research that won an Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for Volkswagen also involved monkeys watching cartoons while they inhaled automobile fumes — a fact that was not publicly known at the time the prize was awarded. Nor was it known to the Ig Nobel Board of Governors. The monkeys/cartoons news was reported today by Jack […]
Although a considerable body of scholarly work has examined the effects of Helium (2He) on human voice production [see, for example (Helium-assisted) High note research] we are by no means the only animals to have been investigated in this respect – here is a (non-exhaustive) list of examples of other creatures who have squawked, croaked, […]
From time to time, unusual animal behavior comes to the attention of the science community. Now comes this study: “Unusual Behaviour in Grey Woolly Monkeys (Lagothrix cana): Females Breastfeeding Adult Males,” Bárbara Cartagena-Matos, Hilton Ferreira Japyassú, Mariana Cravo-Mota, and Bruna Martins Bezerra, Mammalian Biology-Zeitschrift für Säugetierkunde, vol. 80, no. 1 (2015): 59-62. (Thanks to Ig Nobel Prize […]
Ekman isolated the wink, you see. In 1976 the Facial Actions Coding System [FACS] was developed by Paul Ekman and colleague Wallace V. Friesen. It featured in their paper for the inaugural issue of Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior, 1(1), pp. 56-75, which was entitled ‘Measuring Facial Movement’. The Facial Action Code was derived from […]
Random accumulation and simulated monkeys figure quite deliberately in this two-part study (it parallels the recent findings of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning team who won their Ig for showing that promoting people at random can produce better results than promoting by other methods): “An evaluation of alternative equity indices. Part 1: Heuristic and optimised weighting […]
For an extremely partial read, peruse this document (the complete PDF of which is online): NOTES TOWARDS THE COMPLETE WORKS OF S H A K E S P E A R E BY ELMO [pictured below],GUM,HEATHER,HOLLY, MISTLETOE & ROWAN SULAWESI CRESTED MACAQUES (MACACANIGRA) FROM PAIGNTON ZOO ENVIRONMENTAL PARK (UK) BONUS: Notes about the notes (Thanks […]
A possible breakthrough in understanding the relation, if any, between hydration and water: “Hydration level is an internal variable for computing motivation to obtain water rewards in monkeys,” Takafumi Minamimoto, Hiroshi Yamada, Yukiko Hori and Tetsuya Suhara [pictured here], Experimental Brain Research, epub 2012.
Beware of fake monkey automatons (or, if you are a purist: automata). Don’t be fooled, these are of completely modern fabrication, and virtually all of them seen to date did at one time have a fairly large, old-looking makers label glued to the rear panel. We’ve only found one example so far, from a collector […]