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On the 7^th of December, 2008, in the heart of Scotland, a chimpanzee called Pansy died peacefully. She was over 50 years old and lived on an island in Blair Drummond Safari Park with three other chimps – her daughter Rosie, another adult female called Blossom, and Blossom’s son Chippie.

Their reaction to her passing was recorded by the park’s cameras (see video above) and many of their actions seem remarkably human. The others seemed to care for Pansy in her final minutes, examine her body for signs of life, and avoid the place where she died. Rosie even conducted the equivalent of an all-night vigil.

This footage provides a rare glimpse into how one of our closest relatives deal with death, and it’s one of two such examples that have been published today. The second took place several thousand miles away in the forests of Bossou, Guinea. In 2003, a respiratory epidemic killed five of the local chimps, including two babies called Jimato and Veve.

Their mothers, Jire and Vuavua, carried their babies’ lifeless bodies around for 68 and 19 days respectively. They groomed the dead youngsters and chased away the flies that circled them (see image and video below). Even after both babies had completely mummified into dry, leathery husk, the mothers still carried them, and other groups members investigated them.

These examples of quiet, calm behaviour are incredibly different from previous anecdotes. At Gombe National Park in Tanzania, the death of a male who fell from a tree was greeted by an eruption of noise. The others made alarm calls and aggressive displays, and they touched and held each other. They stared and sniffed at the corpse, but no one touched it and after four hours, the group left.

Elsewhere, in the Tai Forest, a leopard fatally mauled a young female and the same mass excitement ensued. This time, the others frequently touched the body and some males even dragged it for short distances before abandoning it. And in other cases, chimps have been shown to attack or even cannibalise the corpses of dead infants, despite the protestations of their mothers.

In stark contrast, Pansy’s peers were calm and restrained. When studying animal behaviour, it is always important to avoid the trap of anthropomorphism, but one cannot help but draw comparisons between Rosie, Blossom and Chippie’s actions and the responses of humans to peaceful death.

Pansy’s final hours were documented by Alasdair Gillies, head keeper at Blair Drummond. She started becoming lethargic in November and started receiving veterinary care. Her fellow chimps seemed to know that something was up. Instead, of sleeping on their usual platforms, they nested near her. At 4pm on December 7th, she started breathing erratically and laboriously and Gillies let the others join her.

They groomed her with unusual frequency in the 10 minutes before her death and afterwards, they seemed to test for life by inspecting her mouth and lifting her limbs. More unusually, Chippie attacked Pansy’s corpse on no less than three occasions (see video below); Gillies thinks that he may have been trying to rouse her or expressing frustration or anger. Blossom groomed her son for an extraordinary amount of time, perhaps an act of consolation or social support.

Rosie, meanwhile, stayed with her mother’s body throughout the night, on a platform that she had never previously slept on. All the three surviving chimps slept restlessly and the next morning, they were all subdued. They removed straw from Pansy’s body, ate less than normal, and watched silently as the keepers took Pansy away. When they were allowed to return to the sleeping area, Blossom and Rosie did so hesistantly, but Chippy refused. His alarm calls drew the other two back to the day area, where the trio spent the night. For the following week, none of the chimps nested on the platform where Pansy died, even though all of them had frequently done so before.

Legendary primate researcher Frans de Waal says, “I have seen chimpanzees die in captive colonies, sometimes unexpectedly and sometimes after a long illness, and the reactions described here correspond with my experiences. There is even a dramatic photograph that reached cyberspace.”

The tale of the African chimps, told by Dora Biro from the University of Oxford, differs in its details but has many parallels. Vuavua paid such care to her dead baby that by the time she abandoned him, his body was largely intact albeit mummified. Jire did the same, although she carried Jimato along for so long that his facial features were largely unrecognisable. Did Jire and Vuavua know that their babies were dead? It’s hard to say. Certainly, they seemed to treat the corpses like live babies, at least for a few days. Towards the end, they started carrying them in positions that they never use for healthy youngsters.

Other chimps touched, poked and sniffed the bodies, and lifted their immobile limbs. Some of the other youngsters even carried them in bouts of play. Even though the bodies’ were starting to deform and smell intensely, only one of the chimps ever reacted in a way that looked like repulsion (see video below). Biro never saw a single act of aggression.

This is hardly the first time that a chimp mother has been seen carrying the mummified corpse of her baby; the first such sighting was made in 1992 and was very similar to the latest ones. De Waal says, “The carrying of dead infants by chimpanzee mothers is well known, and has also been reported for other primates, although never of such long duration. 68 days is longer than any previous report that I have seen!” He says that ape physiology drives an enormous attachment between mother and infant, that doesn’t rapidly shut down when the infant dies. For example, a chimp’s reproductive cycle grinds to a halt for four years after giving birth.

“It would also not be adaptive to abandon an infant every time it gets sick,” says de Waal. “The best option is for mothers to keep hope and keep caring. A rapid shutting down of attachment would be maladaptive: it might lead mothers of near-dead infants to abandon them prematurely.” Why did Jire and Vuavua eventually let go? As their reproductive cycle restarted and all the associated hormonal changes kicked in, the mums could have been psychologically prepped to raise another generation. The fact that Jire carried her dead child for longer than Vuavua may be because she had already had 7 previous children, while Vuavua was a first-time mother.

Both of these examples suggest that chimpanzees have a better awareness of death and dying that people have previously thought. In many ways, this shouldn’t be surprising – these animals are self-aware and empathetic towards each other. Another intellgent animal, the African elephant, also shows remarkably sophisticated behaviour on the death of their peers. De Waal says, “I don’t think this is the same as what elephants do, which visit burial sites long after the death of a companion. But I wouldn’t be surprised if elephants also showed reactions like these (minus the aggressive displays, which seem typically chimp) to the actual death of another.”

Do chimps truly understand the concept of death? Based on the stories of Pansy, Jire and Vuavua, de Waal says, “Definitely, they seem to recognize the death of another, and perhaps realize that this is a permanent change, and a permanent loss. This by itself is already very significant, and reports like these help us understand the depth of their understanding.” But he also adds that we can’t draw any conclusions about whether they understand their own mortality. “To understand one’s own mortality would require extrapolating from what happens to others to one’s own situation. We cannot rule this out, of course, but it would require another big mental jump and for the moment we have no way of knowing if species other than us have made this jump.”

In the meantime, James Anderson, who led the Scottish study, says that the work could affect the way that elderly chimps in zoos and research facilities are cared for. It might, for example, be more humane to let the old-timers die naturally, surrounded by peers and familiar surroundings, than to resort to isolated treatment or euthanasia.

Reference: Current Biology, references unavailable at time of writing

• More on chimp behaviour:
• Culture shapes the tools that chimps use to get honey
• Scientists tickle apes to reveal evolutionary origins of human laughter
• Chimps use Swiss army toolkit to rob beehives
• Altruistic chimpanzees clearly help each other out
• Male chimps trade meat for sex
• Cultured chimps pass on new traditions between groups

Battered, drained of fuel, and travel-weary, Japan’s asteroid-sampler is almost home. The Hayabusa, which the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched in 2003, is scheduled to drop its sample canister in the Australian outback in June. But, the project leaders warn, there’s still a chance than the beleaguered sojourner won’t make it. And even if it does successfully return to Earth, it’s possible that the sample capsule may not contain extraterrestrial rock.

Hayabusa spent three months exploring the Itokawa asteroid in late 2005, even making an unplanned landing on the asteroid’s surface. The probe spent up to a half-hour on Itokawa, making it the first spacecraft to lift off from an asteroid [Space.com]. The craft also took 1,600 pictures and more than 100,000 infrared images.

But things soon turned sour. Hayabusa’s instruments for collecting asteroid samples didn’t deploy as expected, leaving the Japanese research team uncertain how much, if any, material the probe will have on board when it comes back home. While telemetry showed that Hayabusa likely did not fire its projectile as planned while on Itokawa’s surface, scientists are hoping that bits of dust or pebbles traveled through the probe’s funnel and into its sample return capsule [Space.com].

There have been plenty of other difficulties, too. Since its launch in 2003, Hayabusa has lost three of its four ion engines, leaked out all of its chemical propellant and is down to a single reaction wheel. The trouble delayed Hayabusa’s departure from Itokawa, which forced JAXA to postpone the craft’s return to Earth from 2007 until 2010 [Spaceflight Now]. In November JAXA nearly conceded that Hayabusa would never come home. Then, in a stroke of innovation combined with good fortune, the engineers managed to combine the parts that still worked from two of the thrusters to propel the craft. Now it just might make it back.

The saga of the Hayabusa outlines the ambitious nature of President Obama’s newly revised space plan for the United States; on Thursday DISCOVER covered the difficulty of a daring manned mission to an asteroid that he proposed. But for a journey of far more than a thousand miles, the successful return of the Hayabusa would be a terrific first step.

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DISCOVER: Japan Stakes Its Claim in Space, on Hayabusa mission
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80beats: Danger, President Obama! Visiting an Asteroid Is Exciting, But Difficult
80beats: Will NASA’s Next Step Be an Astronaut Rendezvous with an Asteroid?

Image: JAXA

Alan Templeton, whose text Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory is right below Hartl & Clark in my book, recently published a strongly worded paper, Coherent and incoherent inference in phylogeography and human evolution. The possibility of statistical errors in published work is not shocking, I have heard that when statisticians are asked to sort through papers in medical genetics journals there are elementary errors in ~3/4 of those which have made it beyond peer review. That being said Templeton seems to be making a stronger case than simple refutation of basic errors, in particular he is suggesting that the “ABC” method which lay at the heart of the paper I reviewed last week is incoherent at the root. Here’s Templeton’s abstract:

A hypothesis is nested within a more general hypothesis when it is a special case of the more general hypothesis. Composite hypotheses consist of more than one component, and in many cases different composite hypotheses can share some but not all of these components and hence are overlapping. In statistics, coherent measures of fit of nested and overlapping composite hypotheses are technically those measures that are consistent with the constraints of formal logic. For example, the probability of the nested special case must be less than or equal to the probability of the general model within which the special case is nested. Any statistic that assigns greater probability to the special case is said to be incoherent. An example of incoherence is shown in human evolution, for which the approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) method assigned a probability to a model of human evolution that was a thousand-fold larger than a more general model within which the first model was fully nested. Possible causes of this incoherence are identified, and corrections and restrictions are suggested to make ABC and similar methods coherent. Another coalescent-based method, nested clade phylogeographic analysis, is coherent and also allows the testing of individual components of composite hypotheses, another attribute lacking in ABC and other coalescent-simulation approaches. Incoherence is a highly undesirable property because it means that the inference is mathematically incorrect and formally illogical, and the published incoherent inferences on human evolution that favor the out-of-Africa replacement hypothesis have no statistical or logical validity.

The method which Templeton favors is naturally one which he has pushed in the past. In any case, I don’t know the statistical details well enough to comment with much knowledge, but I see that a statistician has responded to Templeton already, so I would recommend checking that out. I immediately went looking for responses because the paper uses really strong and dismissive language, and I am somewhat wary of that sort of thing when attempting to tear down the fundamentals of a whole field of research (I want to emphasize that overall I enjoy Templeton’s work, but the paper reminded me a bit too much of Jerry Fodor). His citation of Popper in particular seems an appeal to authority that aims to convince the non-statisticians in the audience, and I don’t see the point of that besides rhetorical utility. I do tend to accept somewhat Templeton’s critique of models which assume very little gene flow between hominin populations before the Out-of-Africa migration, though from what I can tell it does seem that Africa has had relatively little back-migration south of the Sahara over the past 50,000 years, so perhaps this is an older dynamic as well. I am cautiously optimistic that DNA extraction from fossils themselves may put to bed some of these arguments over the dance of parameters, though naturally interpretation is always an issue outside of pure mathematics.

For what it’s worth, here’s the model which Templeton’s method favors:

The thin lines represent continuous gene flow between populations, and the thick lines extremely strong demographic & genetic pulses which overwhelm the genetic structure status quo periodically. I have implied something similar as operative on the smaller scale of H. sapiens sapiens.

Citation: Coherent and incoherent inference in phylogeography and human evolution, PNAS 2010 107 (14) 6376-6381; doi:10.1073/pnas.0910647107

My latest POI guest, Deb Blum, avers that her book sales on Amazon went up appreciably after our show aired (download here and stream here). Like, wow. Didn’t know we had that power. Of course, it may be because I framed Blum’s book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, as a kind of ideal case study in how to communicate science. But, well, it is. If I give the book an endorsement during the show, it’s because it is richly deserved. Blum does a fantastic job of embedding science within a narrative driven by characters and human drama (in this case, the 1920s scientific quest to catch poisoners, who were previously operating with relative impunity). As an author, she thereby ensures that she will both educate readers about chemistry–on the show, for instance, we discuss the crucial difference between ethyl and methyl alcohol, which had no small policy and human health import during Prohibition–and also intrigue and entertain them. There are many, many would-be science communicators who should take a lesson from Blum’s success. And indeed, in one part of the show that was cut, she told me that Hollywood may be interested in the story she’s created. Once again, if you haven’t heard the show yet, …

In a half-century of hunting, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has turned up nary a whisper from E.T. But for renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, the non-success of SETI and others who hope to contact alien life might be for the best: Aliens, he says, might not like us.

Hawking caused waves with this suggestion in his new Discovery Channel special, which debuted last night. He has long believed that extraterrestrial life exists, simply because of the sheer vastness of the universe. While much of what’s out there might be simple microbial life, there may indeed be new civilizations far more advanced than our own. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be friendly.

Said Hawking: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach” [The Times].

Should aliens decide to drop in on our pale blue dot, he predicts they may come not in a spirit of peace and understanding, but more likely in the spirit with which Europeans conquered Native Americans and colonized what’s now the United States. These alien wanderers similarly might see human society as primitive and unimportant, and attack our planet for its resources, he says.

While Hawking contends that contacting E.T. would be quite risky for us, he also considers the possibility that we’ll never get the chance, even if there are advanced civilizations on distant worlds. “Perhaps they all blow themselves up soon after they discover that E=mc2. If civilizations take billions of years to evolve, only to vanish virtually overnight, then sadly we’ve next to no chance of hearing from them” [MSNBC].

The four-part TV special, which DISCOVER previewed in our April issue, took Hawking and the producers three years to create. Besides the alien menace, Hawking also had a little fun with time travel last night, throwing a party for time travelers and sending out invitations after the party (nobody from the future comes). The third and fourth parts, covering the life and death of the universe, air this coming Sunday, May 2.

For another take on Hawking’s comments, head to Bad Astronomy where Phil Plait takes a more skeptical view of the potential for doom-wielding alien visitors.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Stephen Hawking Is Making His Comeback
DISCOVER: Inside the World of Stephen Hawking
DISCOVER: Hawking’s Exit Strategy
DISCOVER: The Best in Science Culture This Month
Cosmic Variance: Hawking: Beware the Alien Menace!
Bad Astronomy: In Which I Disagree With Stephen Hawking

Image: “Independence Day” / Centropolis Entertainment

Well, so much for getting a new piece of climate legislation introduced today. As ClimateWire reports:
The Senate climate bill sits on the brink of collapse today after the lead Republican ally threatened to abandon negotiations because of a White House push to simultaneously overhaul the nation’s immigration policies.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been under fire from conservatives for months for helping to shepherd a Democrat-led bid to tackle global warming via a “grand compromise” on energy. But on Saturday afternoon, he signaled the partnership could soon be over.
Graham promised to leave President Obama and Senate Democrats standing at the altar after they started pushing last week for a comprehensive immigration reform bill that he called “nothing more than a cynical political ploy” headed into the 2010 midterm elections. Oh boy. Need I say that this flap augurs extremely poorly for the chances of getting a bill passed any time soon? The politics of this are hard enough already, and now we’re stopping before we even got started. Quoted in the ClimateWire piece, I think Tom Friedman puts it best:
“The result is, right now … in Beijing, they are high-fiving each other,” Friedman added. “Oh yeah baby. This means the Americans are …

Apparently Stephen Hawking read my book, but not very carefully, because he thinks aliens will come here ala “Independence Day”* and eat up all our resources and move on.

I disagree with him. I think in fact it’s more likely that an aggressive alien race would create self-replicating robot probes that will disperse through the galaxy and destroy all life that way.

But more likely still doesn’t equate to likely. I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a few days, in fact, and I suspect a likely answer to Fermi’s Paradox — “Where are they?” — is simply that intelligent life that is capable of interstellar flight doesn’t last long enough to colonize other stars. That would neatly explain why, if stars with planets are common (which we know is almost certainly true), and the conditions for life to arise are relatively common (again, that seems very likely), the galaxy isn’t overrun with life. It should be by now; it’s had billions of years to have space-faring races evolve and colonize the whole shebang.

So in reality, Hawking’s idea and the one I go over in my book are probably wrong. But I’m an optimist, and I can hope that the reason the galaxy isn’t softly humming with life (that’s Carl Sagan’s poetic phrase) is that we’re the first, or at least the first in a while. That would mean we still get our chance. It’s a big responsibility, really.

And to be clear, that’s not snark, even if this post started out a bit snarky. I’m serious. We may be utterly, entirely alone in a galaxy filled with planets that outnumber people on our own planet 50 to 1. That idea gives me the creeps more than the idea of hostile aliens bent on sterilizing each of those planets. But at least it gives us a good chance to spread and see the place a bit. I’d like to think that in a hundred generations, this arm of the Milky Way will boast a thousand human planets. It’s a nice thought.

[Note added after I wrote this: I see Sean at Cosmic Variance has weighed in on this as well. But I heard it first from that man about town Josh Cagan.]

---

^*A movie I liked and about which I am unapologetic.

I attended SkeptiCal 2010 on Saturday, a conference on science and skepticism organized by Bay Area Skeptics. The conference sold out all 200 slots, and the audience is a pretty lively bunch. I was invited here to speak at a breakout session in the afternoon on “Myths and Facts about the LHC” which I trust was entertaining, given all the media attention to the possibility that the LHC will destroy the world by producing a black hole, that the Higgs boson is coming back from the future to prevent its discovery, and the various notions about CERN in Angels and Demons such as that the lab is using the LHC to create an antimatter superweapon. All relatively standard topics for the skeptics…

The opening talk, but Eugenie Scott, addressed the rather deep question of how skepticism relates to science: is one included in the other? Do they overlap? Her conclusion, arrived at with humor, grace, and thoughtful examples, was that science is contained within skepticism, that the general approach to knowing we call skepticism is applied in the case of science to understanding the natural world. As a physicist, I need to continually put myself in the mindset of the (mostly) non-physicists in the audience. Skepticism is to a physicist as natural as breathing…this is not true of everyone in the world!

David Morrison, senior scientist at NASA Ames’ Astrobiology institute, gave a truly mind-boggling talk about the rapidly increasing end-of-the-world-in-2012 phenomenon. It all started with Nibiru, the planet that the Zetas told a Wisconsin woman, Nancy Lieder, would crash into the earth round about then. Of course the thing snowballed and led to the movie 2012 (actually the movie appropriated the 2012 meme a few years into prouction). Morrison has received over 3500 emails about the phenomenon, ranging from death threats against him (because, natch, NASA is covering it all up) to suicide threats (who wants to live to see the end of the world?) and everything in between. He made a youtube video trying to allay fears of the world’s imminent demise. (Of course I told my session that the LHC was scheduled to resume at full energy on Dec. 21, 2012, the particular date in question.)

I had a difficult choice of parallel sessions to attend, but chose the one on psychics by Karen Stollznow. And, of all things, I learned something very interesting about quantum physics that I had been blissfully unaware of. Watch for a future post once I read up on that.

In the afternoon, Brian Dunning, creator and host of Skeptoid.com, delivered a devastating blow to the myth of the origins of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most pervasive symbol of Catholicism in Mexico. What becomes clear is that this was another example of the Catholic church appropriating the symbols of the indigenous population it was attempting (ultimately successfully) to convert. In the beginning, though, he lamented the failure of the skeptical movement as a movement. He pointed out that all that skepticism can offer is negative: we kill sacred cows and remove the scales from peoples’ eyes. But how will we save critical thinking?

All in all I found the conference quite eye-opening, and I have realized that we have a long way to go to counter the rising tide of ignorance of science and what it means to adopt a skeptical world view. Even once-respectable types like Bill Nye and Michio Kaku are starting to fall to the dark side. Too many think of skepticism as simply disbelief, when all it means is to place rationality at the base of our intellectual foundation. Help!

Okay, that’s a bit alarmist. But Stephen Hawking has generated a bit of buzz by pointing out that contact with an advanced alien civilization might not turn out well for us backward humans. In fact, we should just try to keep quiet and avoid being noticed.

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said.

Prof Hawking thinks that, rather than actively trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, humans should do everything possible to avoid contact.

He explained: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

To which I can only say: yeah. Sounds about right. If aliens were sufficiently enlightened to be utterly peace-loving and generous, it would be great to have back-and-forth contact with them. But it’s also possible that they would simply wipe us out — not necessarily in a Mars Attacks! kind of invasion, but almost without noticing (as we have done to countless species here on Earth already). So how do you judge the risk? (Dan Drezner gives the interplanetary-security perspective.)

It’s like the LHC doomsday scenarios, but for real — the sensible prior on “murderous aliens” is much higher than on “microscopic black hole eats the Earth.” Happily, a face-to-face chat seems unlikely anyway. Nothing wrong with listening in, on the unlikely chance that the aliens are broadcasting their communications randomly throughout the galaxy. Besides, a little advance warning wouldn’t hurt.

A few more shots from Perth Zoo’s orangutan exhibit. I’ll be back with some proper posts tomorrow, also with a great ape theme…

More shots from Perth Zoo’s wonderful orangutan exhibit. These apes are incredibly intelligent and it would be terrible to let them sit in an enclosure with nothing to stimulate them. So the zoo runs a “behavioural enrichment” programme, which essentially means that they leave plenty of toys, items and challenges to keep the orangutans mentally engaged. Here’s a sequence of a female making use of one such opportunity, and demonstrating the orangutan’s prowess with tools.

She grabs a sturdy stick from the grounds…

and walks over to a metal tray, where a keeper has hidden something. She fishes around for the treat. Sometimes, they will take the stick out and lick it to see what’s buried.

Nearly there…

Got it! A biscuit. OM NOM NOM. Meanwhile, baby watches intently, probably picking up a few tricks or two.

Hey Hollywood, why are you evaporating my youth from a solid directly to a gas?

Stop it. OK? It’s a moral imperative.

Tip o’ the green jello to Swoopy. Mmmmm, Swoopy™.

Alex, a graduate student studying human biology and evolution, writes, “As an undergraduate at I was fortunate enough to study On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Thompson. His synthesis of mathematics, classics and biology was an inspiration to me, and drove me to pursue science as a career. Though I am now studying to be a paleoanthropologist, my tattoo of an (idealized) ammonite fossil is a reminder to me of the material and mathematical processes behind all living things. Plus extinct cephalopods are more aesthetically appealing than hominin skulls.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

One of Hollywood’s most memorable kisses took place between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in the 1946 film Notorious. What’s noteworthy is that it happened during the years of the Hays Code (1930-1968) when “scenes of passion” were extremely restricted and kisses were limited to seconds. To get around the regulations, director Alfred Hitchcock cleverly filmed Grant and Bergman exchanging a series of interrupted kisses as Grant answers a telephone call. So each kiss takes just moments, but the entire scene is nearly three minutes. Submit your photograph or artwork to the Science of Kissing Gallery and remember to include relevant links. The Science of Kissing debuts January 2011.

More shots from Perth Zoo’s wonderful orangutan exhibit. Orangutans are all too capable of walking on two legs from time to time, and this penchant for bipedalism allows them to negotiate tricky parts of the canopy. One of the females in Perth Zoo is particualrly fond of ambling around on two legs. These photos of her doing so look for all the world like a human in an orangutan costume…

One of the bright sides of being stranded at Perth by a giant ash cloud was a visit to Perth Zoo and, particualrly, visiting their orangutan exhibit. I’ve been to quite a number of zoos in my time and that had to rank with the best enclosures I have ever seen. The zoo is part of an international conservation programme and its six or so orangutans have a sizeable area to roam around, complete with tall towers, ropes, ladders and more. The next couple of posts will showcase some of the photos I took of these animals, and will help to fill some bloggy time as I wind my weary way back to the UK.

We start with the baby, who was undoubtedly the highlight of the day. Just try and look at these photos without grinning.

After taking the shot below, I asked a keeper about whether the orangutans ever undid the fixtures in their enclosure. She grinned and told me about the story described in this news report. One of the females actually undid a rope and swung out into the visitors’ area, showing remarkable restraint in just ambling along the wall and in not making a Tarzan noise. Because, clearly, that’s what you or I would have done.

One of the cooler blogs out there is Ironic Sans by David Friedman (the same guy who made scientific Valentine cards). He’s started a new blog called SundayMagazine.org, where posts and discusses old issues of the New York Times Sunday Magazine from the ancient archives.

In his first one, he found quite the catch:

How cool is that? The article is about a lettered French scientist speculating about what life would be like on other planets. David has a PDF of the article as well, which is an absolute delight to read. How wonderful to see something like that; an apparently scientifically-minded article, but free to have fun and take the reader to a totally different place than what they might expect!

It’s inspiring, in fact. Given that kind of freedom today, I wonder what other famous scientists of today would write about.

My next installment as a Point of Inquiry host just went up–you can download here and stream here. Here’s a description of the show:
For many of us, chemistry is something we remember with groans from high school. Periodic Table of the Elements—what a pain to memorize, and what was the point, anyway? So how do you take a subject like chemistry and make it exciting, intriguing, and compelling? With her new book The Poisoner’s Handbook, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Deb Blum has done just that. Blum takes a page from the “CSI” franchise, and moves that familiar narrative of crime, intrigue, and high tech bad-guy catching back into the early days of the 20th century. There, in jazz age New York, she chronicles the birth of forensic chemistry at the hands of two scientific and public health pioneers—the city’s chief medical examiner Charles Norris, and his chemistry whiz side-kick Alexander Gettler. And while chronicling their poison-sleuthing careers, Blum also teaches quite a bit of science. Her book is a case study in science popularization, and one we should all be paying close attention to. Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and has been a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison …

“AIM: The objective was to determine if appropriately trained sexologists could infer women’s history of vaginal orgasm from observing only their gait. METHODS: Women with known histories of either vaginal orgasm or vaginal anorgasmia were videotaped walking on the street, and their orgasmic status was judged by sexologists blind to their history… …RESULTS: In the sample of healthy young Belgian women (half of whom were vaginally orgasmic), history of vaginal orgasm (triggered solely by penile-vaginal intercourse) was diagnosable at far better than chance level (81.25% correct, Fisher’s Exact Test P < 0.05) by appropriately trained sexologists… …CONCLUSIONS: The discerning observer may infer women’s experience of vaginal orgasm from a gait that comprises fluidity, energy, sensuality, freedom, and absence of both flaccid and locked muscles.” [Originally posted 9/1/09] Photo: flickr/loop_oh Related content:
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What is the impact of strict population control? Unintended consequences. Note the convergence in fertility between South Korea and the People’s Republic of China. Coercion or no, some things are inevitable.

Beating Obesity. Marc Ambinder went from 235 to 150 in a year after surgery.

For ancient hominids, thumbs up on precision grip. Many things which we perceive to be derived may be more ancestral than we’d thought.

New Genetic Framework Could Help Explain Drug Side Effects. Medicine is a crap shoot, so you want to load the die in your favor as much as you can.

Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward. Not too surprising, but there’s a lot of “complex behavior” whose building blocks are probably pretty ancient. The fact that humans can “socialize” with dogs and cats are somewhat suggestive to me of common mammalian cognitive furniture.