I’m scouring the American Journal of Primatology for a paper on gorillas using tools as weapons in the wild. National Geographic News says the paper is out, but I can’t find it anywhere in the early edition nor in the current issues. I’ll continue looking, but in the mean time here’s what we got to [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Neuroscience’
June 4, 2007
Rhesus Macaques are Statisticians
There’s new research coming out from Nature that shows us rhesus macaques are really tuned into statistics and probabilities, they may even have neurons specialized to calculate probabilities. But don’t get your hopes up too high… these monkeys will not be your bookies or be crunchin’ gout some gnarly ANOVA tests with p-value significance.
What you [...]
May 22, 2007
Using Macaques to treat Parkinson’s Disease
I consider Pakinson’s a very devastating neurodegenerative disease because the affected individuals are fully aware of their degeneration. Unlike Alzheimer’s, where individuals become jaded as the disease progresses, individuals with Parkinson’s are very conscious of what’s happening or actually what’s not functioning correctly — and they can’t do a thing about it!
So some new findings from [...]
May 21, 2007
Brainstorming the Future of Primate Brain Evolution Research
The following post is a departure from my usual reporting on an interesting primate related tidbit of research. I’ll be posting about how I have thought about how to study primate brain evolution research. These are just ideas I have brainstormed. It is very probable that people are doing this out in their respective labs [...]
May 15, 2007
Sexual selection and its influence on primates brains
Since primate brains and sexual dimorphism are topics that are still fresh on our minds after this morning’s post, I figured I should let you know about a new publication that came out of the open access journal BMC Biology on the differences between male and female primate brain structures and how they developed. It [...]
May 8, 2007
The Human Mutation - a mutation in neuropsin is found only in humans
So if you have been in the dark about what’s been making a lot of buzz around the internet today, have no worries. I’m more than happy to explain it to you, because this new research will really help us understand what it means to be human and non-human.
How, you ask?
Well, it identifies a unique [...]
April 13, 2007
Atlanta Zoo’s Orangutans play video games!
Well hot dang, I was reading Omni Brain the other day, where Steve broke the news that Atlanta Zoo’s orangutans play video games. But I didn’t post about it, not because it ain’t primatology related news, but because there wasn’t a video to support it. In my mind, if I can’t see it, it is [...]
March 4, 2007
Primate brain evolution: Integrating multiple lines of evidence
Last year, Nick Matzke of the ever informative evolutionary biology blog “The Panda’s Thumb” posted a neat little graph where he made a comparison of hominin brain sizes in relation to body sizes.
His post, “Fun with hominin brain size as a percentage of body mass” touches on one of my favorite topics in primatology, the [...]
February 28, 2007
FEELIX Growing: Robots and the animal mind
BBC News recently reported on a pretty interesting three-year long research project that is not the typical non-human primate-focused research we usually highlight on this site, but I couldn’t resist bringing it up. The project, FEELIX Growing, a multi-national project is aiming to create robots that read and react to humans in an appropriate manner. [...]
February 22, 2007
Stress: Physiological effects and surrounding research
A big topic of conversation in zoos and other animal facilities is stress: Who suffers from it? What are the causes and repercussions? How can we identify it biologically? And what are the best ways to recognize the causes in hopes of alleviating the stress?
We have all seen stress in animals [...]
