Penis Worms Show the Evolution of the Digestive System

A team of scientists has revealed that the enigmatic marine penis worms (priapulids) develop their intestine as humans, fish or starfish. This surprising finding shows that very different animals share a common way of forming a gut.

A research team led by Dr. Andreas Hejnol from the Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in Norway, examined the formation of the gut and the expression of genes needed to form the mouth and the anus in priapulid embryos. Priapulids are an obscure group of marine worms that live in shallow waters.

"Surprisingly, priapulids form the gut like humans, fish, frogs, starfish and sea urchins -and all of them even use the same genes. It does not mean that these penis worms are now closely related to humans. Instead the fact that different animals share a common way of forming the gut suggests that the embryological origins of the human intestine and how it develops are much older than previously thought -- most likely over 500 million years, when the first bilaterally symmetric animals appeared on Earth" remarks Hejnol.

The study, featured online on the 25th of October in the journal Current Biology, represents the first description of the entire embryonic development of these enigmatic animals.

"Priapulids are important for understanding the evolution of animals, because they are thought to be among the first bilaterally symmetric animals and have changed very little since the Earth's Cambrian Period" says first author Dr José M. Martín-Durán.

Bilaterally symmetric animals (99% of all animals) are those with a left and right body side. Historically, they have been divided into two large groups based on major differences in how the gut develops in the embryo. The intestine is an essential organ, and that is why it is present in nearly all animal species. The gut develops very early, when some cells move towards the inside of the embryo, usually at a defined region that is called the 'blastopore'.

"The important point is that in some animals this region becomes the mouth, while in others it becomes the anus. For more than a century, this difference has captivated scientists, but there is not a completely satisfactory explanation for it yet" explains Hejnol.

The work shows how important it is to study the vast diversity of animals found in the oceans.

"Priapulids still hide a lot of secrets to unravel, which will have a great influence on our understanding of the origin of other major organs, such as the brain, blood or legs" concludes Hejnol.

They reproduce in winter time, so the scientists have to travel regularly to the west coast of Sweden during the ice-cold season to get a hold of them.

Read more at Science Daily

Why is Fear Fun?

With Halloween approaching, it's hard to avoid ghosts, goblins and other spooky decorations. But some people go even further, seeking out horror movies and convoluted haunted houses that are designed to scare the living daylights out of them.

What possesses people to seek out experiences that make them tremble with fear?

Enjoyment likely comes not from the fear itself, experts say, but from the physical and emotional release that follows scary situations.

For some people, the urge to feel fear also represents one manifestation of a sensation-seeking personality drawn to adrenaline-pumping activities like skydiving, rollercoasters or even drugs. Horror may even give people an opportunity to identify with or wage battle against their own psychological monsters.

"Fear is a negative emotion that comes about when people are under siege or threat, and that is not pleasant," said Glenn Sparks, a professor of communication who studies the media's effects on people at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

"After researching this as long as I have, I have not seen any empirical evidence that people actually enjoy the emotional experience of fright," he added. "Instead, I see evidence that people are enjoying other things that go along with this experience."

The desire to be afraid is far from universal. In surveys, Sparks said, only about a third of people said they seek out scary entertainment. A third actively avoid it. And the rest occupy a middle ground where they can accept some fear if it's not too extreme and if the overall nature of the experience is interesting to them.

Even for people who like horror movies, the habit causes negative emotions that often linger. Because distressing feelings are stored in the brain's amygdala, which is particularly resistant to letting go, the scariest films can continue to spook people for a long time.

After seeing the movie Jaws for the first time, for example, many people refused to swim in the ocean. After watching Psycho, a lot of viewers couldn't take a shower without peeking behind the curtain first. And The Exorcist scared people so badly that they had to be hospitalized for psychological fall-out.

And yet, dedicated horror fans keep coming back for more. One reason is a phenomenon known as "excitation transfer." When scared, the body undergoes spikes in heart rate, breathing rate and muscle tension, among other involuntary responses. And that kind of arousal is not necessarily pleasant.

But when the extreme sense of excitement wears off, it is replaced by an equally intense sense of relief, and those positive feelings are stronger than they would have been otherwise. A sense of mastery can also come from enduring a frightening situation and emerging triumphant.

"People may remember a haunted house at Halloween or a scary movie and they think, 'I really felt good after that,'" Sparks said. "They're remembering the intense positive emotions they had afterwards, not necessarily that the enjoyed the feeling of fear at all. There was something about the experience they remember as good, even though they know there were negative things, too."

Horror also incorporates an element of sex. In a 1986 experiment, teenage boys and girls watched scary videos in pairs. Unbeknownst to the other person, one member of the pair was instructed to follow a certain script that either conformed to or rejected stereotypical gender roles.

When girls acted scared, the boys they were with found them more attractive than if they talked about how lame the movie was, the researchers found. Likewise, girls were more attracted to boys who acted brave and unfazed by frightening imagery."

"Horror movies are very huggable movies because people sit there and grab each other," said Stuart Fischcoff, a retired psychologist and screenwriter who is now the senior editor of the Journal of Media Psychology. "Boys can role-play being a man and girls can role-play being a damsel in distress."

Read more at Discovery News

'Zombie Exoplanet' Back From the Dead?

An enormous alien planet that some astronomers thought was dead and buried has come back to life, a new study suggests.

A new analysis of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found that the bright nearby star Fomalhaut does indeed host a huge exoplanet, which scientists dubbed a "zombie" world in an aptly Halloween-themed video on the alien planet. This conclusion contradicts other recent studies, which determined that the so-called planet -- known as Fomalhaut b -- is actually just a giant dust cloud

"Given what we know about the behavior of dust and the environment where the planet is located, we think that we're seeing a planetary object that is completely embedded in dust rather than a free-floating dust cloud," co-author John Debes, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement.

The saga of Fomalhaut b began in November 2008, when Hubble astronomers announced that a planet circled Fomalhaut, which lies 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. Fomalhaut b was the first alien world ever directly imaged in visible light, they said.

The planet was spotted just inside a vast debris ring surrouding but slightly offest from the star. Based on Fomalhaut b's location and mass -- estimated to be less than three times that of Jupiter -- astronomers thought the planet's gravitational pull likely explained the ring's appearance.

But other scientists subsequently cast doubt on Fomalhaut b's existence. Some have argued that the object is just a short-lived dust cloud, citing the brightness variations reported by the discovery team and the fact that NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has been unable to pick up its infrared signature.

The doubters also pointed to Fomalhaut b's apparent motion, saying it was moving in an orbit too fast and out of line with the debris disk to have sculpted it.

But the new study detects the planet all over again, in a fresh analysis of Hubble observations from 2004 and 2006. The research team spotted Fomalhaut b in three different wavelengths of visible light. The astronomers did not detect any brightness variations this time around, further bolstering Fomalhaut b's planethood case.

"Although our results seriously challenge the original discovery paper, they do so in a way that actually makes the object's interpretation much cleaner and leaves intact the core conclusion -- that Fomalhaut b is indeed a massive planet," said lead author Thayne Currie, an astronomer formerly at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and now at the University of Toronto.

The new study also pins down Fomalhaut b's orbital characteristics, finding that the planet's gravity could indeed be shaping the debris disk, researchers said.

"What we've seen from our analysis is that the object's minimum distance from the disk has hardly changed at all in two years, which is a good sign that it's in a nice ring-sculpting orbit," said co-author Timothy Rodigas  of the University of Arizona.

Read more at Discovery News

What Happened at the OK Corral?

On Oct. 26, 1881, four men met at the corner of Fifth and Allen Streets in the bustling silver mining town of Tombstone, Arizona. They walked north on Fifth, turned left on Fremont Street and headed toward a vacant lot next to the OK Corral.

Minutes later, three men would be dead, and the four men who had walked to the corral and killed them – Tombstone marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and Wyatt’s friend Doc Holliday – had unknowingly secured their places in history.

The Gunfight at the OK Corral is arguably the single most famous incident in the Old West. But what was it about? And why has it, above all the many other gunfights that took place in the era of frontier justice, achieved such infamy?

To understand the gunfight, you have to first understand the town. Tombstone in 1881 was a thriving, bustling silver mining community.

“There’s a huge misconception about Tombstone in the 1880s: that it was a violent, dangerous place,” says local author and historian Don Taylor. “It was extremely sophisticated and massively wealthy. Thirty-seven million dollars in 1880s dollars of silver was mined here; that’s $8.25 billion today. They had everything.

“They had fresh seafood every day. They would catch it in Baja California; pack it in barrels of salt, ice and seaweed at dusk; freight it by train to Benson or Contention City, immediately pack it on to wagons and bring it here by dawn every day. It was a very opulent town. But again, people don’t understand – especially if they come today – Tombstone was open 24 hours a day.

The miners worked rotating 10 hour shifts; everything had to be open when they got off, including banks. They were also pumping 2.5 million gallons of water out of the mines every day to keep them dry; so you had all the mining activity, all the milling activity, all the water rushing down Toughnut Street, and the town open 24 hours a day. It must have been noisy as hell.”

As the mines thrived, so did all manner of supporting businesses: banks, bars, restaurants, hotels – and prostitutes, many of whom worked out of small ‘cribs’ that lined Sixth Street. The riches to be, had attracted plenty of would-be entrepreneurs -- among them Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, James and Warren Earp, and Doc Holliday.

Both Virgil and Wyatt had been lawmen; Virgil had recently been appointed deputy marshal for the part of the Arizona Territory that included Tombstone, and although some record-keeping at the time was poor, it is possible that Wyatt may have been a deputy marshal as well.

Certainly, it appears as if all the brothers were anxious to join the list of those profiting from Tombstone’s booming business: they invested in one of the mines, James tended bar, Wyatt rode as a stagecoach guard and dealt faro – the popular card game of the time – in a local saloon.

But Tombstone’s growth and growing sophistication grated with one segment of society: the ‘cowboys’, a loose confederation of ranchers and cattle rustlers. The cowboys – who were predominantly rural, southern Confederates – eyed the primarily Yankee mercantile class that was dominating Tombstone, and which the Earps typified, with suspicion. And the feeling was mutual.

It didn’t take long after the Earps’ arrival in late 1879 for tensions between them and the cowboys to develop, particularly with Virgil and Wyatt spending time in law enforcement positions. That tension reached boiling point when Wyatt helped in the identification and arrest of some cowboy members in a pair of stagecoach robberies, and the cowboys in turn asserted that Wyatt and Holliday had in fact been the ones responsible for the holdups.

On the night of Oct. 25, 1881, one of the cowboy leaders, Ike Clanton, got into a heated, drunken argument with Holliday, and the next morning he wandered drunkenly up and down Allen Street, threatening to kill him and the Earps. A series of confrontations steadily escalated until Virgil was informed that a group of armed cowboys had gathered outside Fly’s Boarding House – where Holliday was living – in a vacant lot close to the OK Corral.

Carrying guns inside city limits was a violation of a town ordinance, and it provided Virgil, who was now town marshal, with an opportunity to arrest the cowboys. But there may also have been other considerations at play.

As the self-identified Dr. Jay, who leads historical tours of Tombstone, explains: “Ike Clanton had openly threatened to kill the Earps. And why are they in that alley? Because it’s right outside Fly’s Boarding House. So if you’re Doc Holliday, you show up and here’s a bunch of guys with guns outside your house. You might want to think about, ‘Are they going to get me tomorrow if I don’t get them today?’”

Virgil deputized his brothers and Holliday and they set off for the vacant lot.

“Throw up your hands,” shouted Virgil as they reached the alleyway’s entrance. “I mean to disarm you.”

There was a pause, and the click-click of a gun – or guns – being cocked.

“Hold on, I don’t want that!” shouted Virgil, but it was too late.

There were two shots fired simultaneously – it is uncertain by whom – and then, as Wyatt later testified, “the fight then became general.”

Ironically, Ike Clanton, who had instigated the confrontation, fled the scene, grabbing Wyatt and screaming that he was unarmed.

“The fight has commenced,” snarled Earp. “Get to fighting or get away.” Clanton promptly took off, as did another cowboy, Billy Claiborne.

Within seconds, two of the cowboys – Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton – lay mortally wounded, Virgil Earp had been shot in the calf, and Morgan Earp shot through the shoulder blades. A third cowboy, Frank McLaury, shot in the stomach, staggered into Fremont Street and leveled his gun at Holliday.

“I’ve got you now,” he said, mistakenly believing Holliday was out of ammo.

“Blaze away,” taunted Holliday. “You’re a daisy if you do.”

At that point both Holliday and Morgan Earp fired almost simultaneously; bullets from one or both of their guns struck McLaury in the head, killing him.

The entire gunfight lasted approximately 30 seconds.

The following day, the headline in the 'Tombstone Epitaph' newspaper read, “Three Men Hurled into Eternity in the Duration of a Moment.” The cowboys’ supporters insisted their men had been killed in cold blood. The Earps and Holliday stood trial for murder, but were cleared.

A hundred and thirty years later, the gunfight has been the focus of numerous motion pictures, and a part of many more – and was even pivotal to an episode in the original series of Star Trek. So we ask again: why has the slaying of three men on a misdemeanor firearms violation endured through history?

 Don Taylor offers one explanation. “In January 1881, (Tombstone mayor) John Clum joined the brand new Associated Press,” he explains. “So everything he wrote went to San Francisco, Chicago, New York. Everybody knew what was going on here.”

There was also, explains Tim Fattig, who works as a tourist guide at the OK Corral and has written a voluminous biography of Wyatt Earp, another factor: the fact that the gunfight did not mark the end of the Earp-cowboy feud.

On Dec. 28, 1881, Virgil Earp survived an assassination attempt, but lost the use of his left arm. The following March, Morgan was gunned down and killed while playing billiards.

In revenge, Wyatt, Warren Earp, Holliday and others set out on a “vendetta ride” for justice, in which they killed at least three cowboys, including the faction’s de facto leader, Curly Bill Brocius.

“It was the vendetta ride that truly elevated the gunfight in public perception,” Fattig says. “The idea of a brother gaining revenge for one brother’s murder and another being wounded is compelling.”

Read more at Discovery News

Ancestor Lucy Spent Time in Trees

Our closest known relative 3.3 million years ago was a half-human, half-ape species that could both walk on the ground and swing through the trees, suggests a new study.

The research, published in the journal Science, sheds light on Australopithecus afarensis, the species of the well-known "Lucy" skeleton. In this case, remains of a three-year-old A. afarensis girl, named "Selam," were the focus of study. Selam represents the most complete skeleton of her kind to date.

She and other members of her species were "very human-like from the waist down -- the hip bone, the knee and the foot -- but looked ape-like above the waist -- the torso, long arms, gorilla-like scapula, jutting snout, small brain and a skull with no forehead," co-author Zeresenay Alemseged told Discovery News. "A sketchy depiction of it would be an upright walking ape."

Alemseged, curator of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences, and David Green, an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at Midwestern University, made the determinations after thoroughly examining the well-preserved skeleton of Selam. In 2000, Alemseged unearthed her remains while excavating a site in Dikika, Ethiopia.

The researchers paid attention to Selam's two complete shoulder blades. These tend to be paper-thin, rarely fossilizing, so finding both "completely intact and attached to a skeleton of a known and pivotal species was like hitting the jackpot," Alemseged said.

The analysis of the shape and function of the bones revealed that A. afarensis had ape-like shoulder blades, indicating a partially arboreal lifestyle. Green explained to Discovery News that, during Selam's lifetime, A afarensis was a widespread species across East Africa that occupied a range of habitats, including wooden environments and gallery forests.

"Within this range of environments, Selam and her kin walked upright to move from one place to the other, but also had an arboreal lifestyle that enabled them to nest in trees, evade predators, and provision themselves," Green said. "This was a significant adaptation that enabled this short-statured hominin, with no sophisticated tools, to survive in a dangerous landscape filled with large felines and other carnivores."

The study reveals how apelike features in our ancestors were not merely evolutionary baggage, he continued. The traits instead reflect adaptations to habitat.

There is no question that Australopithecus afarensis is directly related to humans, according to the researchers.

"A. afarensis is clearly on the human line after the split from apes and eventually became ancestral to the genus Homo," Alemseged said. "It is currently hard to precisely talk about the exact number of species between us and A. afarensis."

Possibilities include A. africanus, Paranthropus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus and many others.

The authors also suspect that A. afarensis was not the first ancestor of humans to walk upright. This could be why Selam's bones indicate she walked with ease, at least when compared to chimpanzees that have been trained to do so. Chimps have a lumbering, awkward upright gait because they lack some important pelvic and lower limb characteristics that Selam possessed.

Read more at Discovery News

Easter Island Statues Could Have 'Walked'

The giant stone statues in Polynesia's Easter Island may have just been "walked" out of quarry, according to a controversial new theory on how the monolithic human figures were transported to every corner of the island.

In a piece of experimental archaeology, a team of local and U.S. researchers showed that the massive statues, known as moai, can be moved from side to side by a small number of people, just as one might move a fridge.

"We constructed a precise three-dimensional 4.35 metric ton replica of an actual statue and demonstrated how positioning the center of mass allowed it to fall forward and rock from side to side causing it to 'walk,'" Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at California State University, Long Beach, and colleagues wrote in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Nearly 1,000 huge statues stand on the remote Rapa Nui, the indigenous name of Easter Island. With sizes ranging from about 6 to 33 feet in height, the rock effiges feature human-like figures ending at the top of the thighs with large heads, long ears and pursed lips.

Scholars have long debated how the multi-ton statues were moved from the quarry in Rano Raraku, an extinct volcano where they were carved, throughout the island's rugged terrain.

Claims ranged from extra-terrestrial intervention to molding in situ. However, most archaeologists agree that the colossal stone statues were moved by rolling them on logs. In doing so, the statue-obsessed Rapa Nui people would have depleted the island of its forests.

But according to Lipo's team, new evidence challenges the "longstanding notions of 'ecocide' and population collapse before European contact."

The researchers looked at the statues that were successfully placed on platforms on the island's perimeter, and others that the islanders abandoned on road sides in an apparently random fashion.

According to Lipo, the position of the incomplete road moai shows that they fell over from upright positions, contradicting the theory that they were horizontally rolled on logs.

"The majority of statues are found facedown when the road slopes downhill, and often on their backs when going uphill," he said.

To test the walking hypothesis, Lipo and colleagues built a 4.35-ton concrete statue, which they say is a "precise proportionally scaled replica of an actual road moai shaped appropriately for transport."

Then they tested its upright movement at Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii.

Chanting "heave-ho," a team of 18 people managed to get the statue walking using three hemp ropes.

One was tied from behind near the top of the head at the eyes to keep the statue from falling on its face. The other two, tied to the same location at the eyes, were stretched on either side and pulled in alternating fashion to rock the statue.

"Each roll caused the statue to take a step," Lipo said. In under an hour, the statue traveled 100 meters.

Read more at Discovery News

'Space Buddha' Statue May Be a Fake

A supposed Buddhist statue allegedly carved from a meteorite 1,000 years ago may not be as ancient as suspected, according to a Buddhism expert who argues that the statue may be a 20th-century fake.

The criticisms don't target the material the statue is carved from, which is an iron- and nickel-rich meteorite from the Siberia-Mongolia border. But outside experts are questioning the statue's origins.

Achim Bayer, a Buddhism expert at Dongguk University in South Korea, argues in a new report that the Buddha statue has obvious "pseudo-Tibetan features," marking it as a European reproduction likely made between 1910 and 1970.

Among these features are European-like shoes that come to the ankles rather than boots; trousers instead of robes; tube-shaped sleeves unlike those seen on traditional Tibetan or Mongolian garb; a full beard, which is not seen on Tibetan and Mongolian deity sculptures; an unusual single earring; and a cape that resembles one worn by Romans rather than ancient Tibetan deities.

In their original paper published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Stuttgart University researcher Elmar Bucher and colleagues reported that the Buddha statue first came to Germany after a 1938-1939 Tibet expedition by zoologist and ethnologist Ernst Schäfer, who was sent to the region by the Nazi party to find the origin of Aryan language and culture. The statue then passed into the hands of a private owner.

But the researchers also warned that the estimates of the age of the statue -- which they pegged around 1,000 years -- were preliminary and welcomed comments by cultural scholars.

"I am happy to provide such information," Bayer wrote in his report, available online.

Read more at Discovery News

Dinosaurs Looking for Love Grew Alluring Feathers

Dinosaurs may have wooed potential mates with flashy feathers, peacock style. Researchers have discovered lengthy wisps on a sexually mature adult, but absent in the toddler specimen of the same dinosaur species.

These findings shed light on the origin of wings and feathered flight, scientists added.

Birds are the last living lineage of dinosaurs. Their predatory dinosaur ancestors and relatives apparently were covered in feathers as well. These downy coats probably helped to keep them warm at first.

It remains hotly debated how the ancestors of birds evolved key traits that allowed them to fly, such as long, strong feathers. To answer this mystery, researchers investigated fossils of a dinosaur called Ornithomimus edmontonicus. These included a turkey-size juvenile about a year old and about 5 feet (1.5 meters) long, and two ostrich-size adults about 10 years old and about 12 feet (4 m) long.

"The most recent ideas about Ornithomimus was that it was herbivorous," said researcher Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary. "They superficially resembled ostriches, with a toothless beak, large eyes, long legs, long tail, and now we know they had feathers, but these animals were not closely related to ostriches."

Downy dinosaurs

The 71-million-year-old bones were excavated from the badlands of Alberta, Canada.

"The climate in the area 71 million years ago was warm and wet, subtropical, very much like that seen today in Florida, Georgia and Louisiana. There would have been swamps and lots of water-loving conifers," said researcher François Therrien, a paleontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Canada.

Famous dinosaurs in that area included predatory tyrannosaurs, the duck-billed hadrosaurs, heavily armored ankylosaurs, and horned dinosaurs known as ceratopsians. Crocodiles and turtles were also common.

All three Ornithomimus specimens were apparently covered in stringy down -- filamentlike feathers up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) long.

"These are the first feathered dinosaur specimens from the Western Hemisphere," Zelenitsky said. "They've never been found in North or South America before -- before this, they were previously almost exclusively found in northern China."

In addition, one adult also had markings on its winglike forelimbs that suggest it bore longer feathers, ones that apparently possessed stiff shafts down the middle much like the feathers found on the wings of flying birds today.

"We don't know how long the shafted feathers were on the adult 'wings,'" Therrien said. "But, based on the size of the markings, we think the 'wing feathers' would have been much longer than the filamentous feathers."

Flashing feathers

Many of the feathered dinosaurs found in China are older than Ornithomimus. However, Ornithomimus comes from a lineage of dinosaurs that arose earlier than some of those unearthed in China. As such, one can consider the "wings" seen in Ornithomimus "the most primitive occurrence of winglike structures in the dinosaurs leading to birds," Zelenitsky said.

Since the younger dinosaur apparently did not possess long feathers on its forelimbs, the investigators suggest these plumes were not used for flight -- otherwise, younger, lighter dinosaurs that were more capable of flight might have possessed them. Instead, the fact these feathers were seen only on sexually mature adults hints they may have used them for reproductive activities such as courtship or brooding, much as peacocks use their outrageously large feathers to woo females. Over time, the ancestors of birds may have adapted these long feathers for flight.

Read more at Discovery News

Incredible Halloween Light Show: Gotta-See Video

There's a new contender for king of the YouTube nighttime light show displays.

Edwards Landing Lights in Leesburg, Virginia has created a Gangnam Style synchronized show akin to many seen on YouTube before. Why the attention this year? The previous king of the light show was a man named Kevin Judd, but his were so popular (see below) that his Home Owner's Assocation (HOA) passed rules to prevent him putting up lights ever again. Yikes.

There's no question that Psy's Korean pop song is one of the hits of 2012, so this is apt to be a hit this Halloween. If you're in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, stop by Leesburg and check out the show, but be respectful, it's a residential neighborhood. via Gawker

Kevin Judd of Riverside, California was one of the kings of nighttime light displays, until his HOA shut him down. Apparently, visitation of his nightly "shows" was so big the visitors would start gathering around 2pm for a 7:30pm show.

The HOA received complaints. Judd owns a company that produces light shows, and according to Judd,'s company's website, "many of our neighbors would come out to watch every night. It’s a shame that some of those same neighbors in the community now do not wish the display to remain."

Read more at Discovery News

The Great Chimp Tech Boom

Chimpanzee innovations may be low tech by human standards, but they get the job done and are gradually improving and spreading, a new study co-authored by famed primatologist Jane Goodall suggests.

The study, published in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, presents the first documented case of successful transmission of a novel cultural behavior -- ant fishing -- between wild chimpanzee communities.

"Ant fishing in this case is using twigs, leaf midribs or grass probes to extract carpenter ants from their nests in living trees or dead wood," lead author Robert O'Malley, an assistant professor of anthropology at Kenyon College, told Discovery News.

Chimps trim their twig tools at the end, with side twigs and excess bark often removed, he added.

A clever and popular female chimp named Trezia somehow figured out this technique. Trezia, from the Mitumba chimp community of Gombe National Park, was transferred to the park's Kasekela chimpanzee community, where ant fishing is now all the rage among females around her age.

"Trezia ascended the Kasekela hierarchy more quickly than most immigrants, who often remain a bit peripheral in the community after emigrating, and she was not skittish around other chimpanzees," O'Malley said. "All this suggests she would have been a viable model for younger cohorts."

The Kasekela chimps had a win-win because, in addition to gaining smart Trezia, they also had the perfect classroom to learn from her: a relaxing spot called Hilltop.

"Kasekela chimpanzees tend to take a siesta at Hilltop for a few minutes or a few hours when they pass through the area, so it provides a relaxed social context and perhaps a good learning environment," explained O'Malley.

"There is very little undergrowth so visibility is very good," he said. "Most importantly, there are multiple fishing sites in visual proximity, including at least one Camponotus (type of ant) nest in a particular place at Hilltop."

Females tend to be the chimp versions of Bill Gates or the late Steve Jobs when it comes to innovations, however low-tech. That's just because "in chimpanzees, females are the sex that will typically disperse from their natal group at sexual maturity, so any cultural transmission between communities is most likely to occur through female transfer."

Trezia is only the latest chimp to gain fame and food fortune among her own kind. A proficient nut-cracking female chimp in Liberia might have spread her know-how to others.

Then there is Imo, a Japanese macaque who learned to wash sweet potatoes.

"Imo also learned to throw scattered rice grains into the sea to separate them from sand, and a few other tricks as well," O'Malley said, adding that others within her own group observed her success and soon copied her methods.

Males also come up with their own useful techniques that appear to spread within their groups. A dramatic example concerns a male chimp living in Bossou, Guinea. He learned to deactivate snares, rescuing other chimps and setting off others before they harmed animals.

Read more at Discovery News