Such is the case for Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana), a group of fruit-loving monkeys that live in the forests of Sulawesi,
Indonesia. Fruit trees are distributed randomly throughout the forest, with some areas containing more fruit than others.
So Tonkean macaques must decide which direction they will move in search of food, and they make those choices by majority vote.
When a particular Tonkean macaque wishes to move the group, he or she walks a few steps in the desired direction, pauses,
The other monkeys then decide whether to support the direction suggested, or whether to offer an alternative.
Like most primates, Tonkean macaques maintain a strict social hierarchy but all group members vote when it comes to these sorts of decisions.
or more dominant individuals who make decisions for other monkey species, such as the closely related rhesus macaques.
Democracy in this form is limited not to primates. African buffalo (Syncerus cafer) are large bovines distantly related to domestic cows that can be found grazing in forests, grasslands and swamps across the African continent.
Food patches vary for African buffalo, based on previous grazing history by the herd as well as by other species
Unlike the Tonkean macaques, only the adult female African buffalo are allowed to vote. But like the monkeys, all adult females vote regardless of their position within the dominance hierarchy.
Also like the monkeys, any female may propose a travel route. One thing animals don't appear to do,
though, is explicitly select their leaders, as humans do. For elephants, it's automatically the oldest female.
Chimpanzees are led by the male who is able to retain hold over his position as most dominant.
A female honey bee becomes queen based on what she eats in the first days of her life
But group decision-making is not unique to our species. Even the smallest worker bee, the youngest Tonkean macaque,
such as the giant tortoises of the Galapagos, the lemurs of Madagascar or the koalas of Australia.
South america got its first large carnivore oe the jaguar from North america oe which proceeded to eat much of the native fauna,
Some species including rats, goats, rhododendron, wheat and eucalyptus are found around the world while many others have become rare or vanished.
or like the jaguar simply consume them to extinction. We've also been spreading pests and diseases from place to place
Meanwhile, we've been artificially boosting the populations of certain select species, such as cows, dogs, rice, maize and chickens oe most
whereas rats and goats that eat the food of rare tortoises are being eliminated. In other places,
such as the lemur sanctuary in the Caribbean that Virgin boss Richard Branson proposed last year.
Scientists are hopeful of cloning mammoths and even restoring our own extinct cousin, the Neanderthal.
On 10 october 2003, a researcher watched as a female elephant named Eleanor collapsed. Her swollen trunk had been dragging on the ground
An elephant named Grace, a member of a different social group, galloped towards Eleanor and tried to heave Eleanor back to her feet with her massive tusks,
The parade of elephants that followed may oe in some deep, fundamental way oe be no different from those who gather to pay respects to a dignitary lying in state.
Over the course of several days, the carcass was visited by five other elephant groups, including several families that were unrelated completely to Eleanor.
The elephants sniffed and poked the body, touching it with their feet and trunks. Even though the carcass had been visited by jackals, hyenas, vultures,
and was under the control of lions by the fourth day, the elephants were rarely more than a few hundred metres away during daylight hours.
Since interest in the carcass was limited not just to Eleanor's relatives, the observing scientists tentatively concluded that elephants had generalised a response to the dead.
Supporting evidence for his conclusion comes from other studies, both observational and experimental. While these behaviours are clearly different from human death rituals,
they're still unique as far as elephant behaviour goes. Underwater ritualsbut humans and elephants aren't the only ones to visit the bodies of the recently deceased.
On 6 may 2000 a dead female dolphin was spotted on the seabed, 50 metres from the eastern coast of Mikura Island, near Japan.
Two adult males remained with the body at all times, leaving the body only briefly to return to the surface to breathe.
As the cause of death was attempted unknown, divers to retrieve the body. However, the presence of the two males prevented a successful retrieval.
 It's far from being documented the only instance of dolphin death rituals. On 20 july 2001, a dead sub-adult male was spotted on a nearby seabed,
Like the African elephants, the attending dolphins nudged and pushed at the carcass with their beaks and heads,
 And when a dead dolphin calf was spotted by another group of scientists near the Canary islands in April 2001,
When an infant chimpanzee dies, his or her mother will carry the lifeless body around for days.
When a three-month-old female chimpanzee was killed in June at the LA Zoo keepers allowed Gracie to retain her infant's body for several days
so that she'd be able to carry out this sort of chimpanzee grieving process. This chimpanzee ritual was described in depth after researchers in Zambia chanced upon a female named Masya who was interacting with the dead body of her four-month-old infant.
Writing in the American Journal of Primatology, researcher Katherine Cronin speculates: The behaviours expressed by this female chimpanzee
when she first endures physical separation from her dead infant provide valuable insight into  the possible ways in which chimpanzees gather information about the state of responsiveness of individuals around them (hence learning about Ëoedeath').
'Similar practices have been observed among gorillas, baboons, macaques, lemurs, and geladas. Elephants, dolphins, and chimpanzees all have complex social behaviours that we only partly understand.
Since it is so rare for humans to observe a natural death in the wild,
most of the information that we do have comes from non-experimental case studies thanks to quick-thinking researchers.
Even still, the available evidence offers an important reminder that humans are not the only animals who respond to death in a particular way.
recent reports suggest that giraffes and western scrub jays may mourn as well, each with their own customs.
The mortician who carefully embalms the recently deceased may have a great deal more in common than he realises with the chimpanzee who painstakingly removes parasites from her dead infant.
What bonds us with the chimpanzee in this sense is that we are, in our different ways,
There, on the fifth floor, one lab is trying to catch everything from fraudulent fish, to mislabeled toy cats, to illegally prepared sheep placenta in traditional Chinese medicine.
 There are sometimes workarounds for answering questions that barcoding can't. Birck laughs as he describes one case in which they got a little snippet of fur that had come from a stuffed cat.
but someone at customs suspected it was real cat fur that had been glued onto the outside of the toy.
A quick look under the microscope confirmed that it was, in fact, real cat hair. The US Customs and Border Protection is hoping to open similar testing facilities in other ports over the coming years.
which records"sightings  of giant squids and whale-like animals. During the visit, the pair began to wonder
along with unstudied primate species and subspecies of bears, some people believe the legends could describe distant relations.
range from surviving collateral hominid species, such as Homo neanderthalensis or Homo floresiensis, to large primates like Gigantopithecus,
For example, the Indonesian cryptid Orang Pendek("short person Â) is described often in Indonesian folklore as a small, hairy, manlike creature not dissimilar to Homo floresiensis.
"In the light of the Flores skeleton, a recent initiative to scour central Sumatra for'Orang Pendek'can be viewed in a more serious light.
and bush in search of new forms of life, there is no reason why the same should not apply to new species of large primate,
it seems increasingly unlikely that large mammals, and especially humanlike species, remain undocumented,  says Dr Murray Cox from the Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Massey University in  New zealand."
So perhaps the possibility of new mammal species there cannot be discounted completely. Â Ëoeproper science'But, others are less forgiving.
or the Orang Pendek to show us real evidence, or otherwise hold your peace, Â he says.
zero-energy system for keeping camel milk cool in soaring temperatures that commonly reach 45c (113 Fahrenheit).
or hunting large mammals to extinction oe their effects were localised. Boy, have changed things. In 1900, there were 1. 6 billion of us;
Their studies in cats, and many other studies since, suggest that if the developing brain isn't exposed to overlapping images from the two eyes,
Tigers: Can we afford to save them? The tiger makes no secret of its danger,
prowling around in a yellow and black stripy catsuit, a trend it shares with other perilous beasts from wasps to snakes.
population of Bengal tigers. Nobody knows how many tigers there are in the park because years of insurgency in Nepal have made it difficult to carry out surveys.
However, with tiger parts attracting a high price on the Asian health potions market, poaching remains a highly profitable prospect in this impoverished region.
As wild tigers (Panthera tigris) become scarcer, the price on their heads goes up: tiger bones are sold for hundreds of dollars in Taiwan, Korea and China, according to WWF figures.
A bowl of tiger penis soup (to boost virility) goes for $320, a pair of eyes (to fight epilepsy) for $170,
and powdered tiger humerus (for treating ulcers and typhoid) for $3, 200 per kilo in Seoul, according to the conservation charity.
Dropping numbersi was in Nepal to see one of the country's estimated breeding population of 120-one of perhaps 3,
000 tigers left in the world, down from 100,000 in 1900. They are the largest of the four"big cats Â
and used to be found anywhere from Siberia to Bali to Turkey. But hunting and habitat encroachment by humans have over the past century reduced their range by more than 90
%and caused the extinction of three subspecies (including the Balinese tiger). There are now six subspecies left, all of
which are classed as endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature,
including the Siberian tiger, which, weighing up to 660 pounds (300 kilogrammes), is the largest; and the Bengal tiger,
which, with almost 2, 000 individuals is the most numerous. More worrying, their numbers have fallen by at least 40%in the past decade alone.
if we"run out  of tigers? Useful, or not? After all, most people never get to see them in the wild anyway,
Moreover, all the alarming figures above relate only to tigers in the wild oe they are endangered far from in captivity.
More than five times as many tigers live in captivity as in the wild, perhaps 20,000. As we bring about what Anthony Barnosky, of University of California Berkeley,
And are wild tigers worth the $350 million global fund set up to rescue them? There is no evidence whatsoever that potions made from tiger parts have a medicinal effect that cannot be attained using other ingredients.
We do not depend on tigers for meat or skins. They do not provide transport or help plough our fields.
Unlike their far smaller cousins, you can't keep one at home to stroke and pet oe well,
Likewise, there are plenty of dogs in Britain, whereas the wolf was eliminated from the island state by the 18th century.
In fact, more than 90%of the weight of all the land vertebrates is made now up of humans
despite our voracious impact on everything from giant sloths to North american bison. And that is because of the recent huge population expansion by us and our chosen creatures.
Conservation benefitsbut many people would argue that tigers are an iconic animal; culturally important in several nations.
such as the Asiatic lion, which once ranged from Northern europe down to South Asia and now persists in tiny numbers (reportedly derived from just 13 individuals) in one small reserve in India.
Or the Barbary lion, the biggest and heaviest lion that was used by the Romans to fight gladiators,
The WWF justifies protecting tigers by pointing out the co-benefits for other wildlife. Individual tigers have such a big range that by protecting each tiger
around 38 square miles (100 square kilometres) of forest is conserved, including other endangered animals such as rhinos,
as well as the vital ecosystem services humans rely on from food to water management. Because tigers are a top predator,
they help regulate and conserve local biodiversity by, for example, helping keep the herbivore numbers down,
Conservationists also argue that tigers are good for the local economy because they attract wildlife/eco tourists to deprived areas in the developing world.
So, if we are going to keep wild tigers, how will we do it? Most conservation strategies rely on guarding the cats against poachers and protective farmers.
Successful efforts on India have relied on bureaucratic form-filling with identification requirements for everyone who wishes to visit tiger reserves,
armed guards and compensation for villagers whose cattle are eaten by tigers. Habitat conservation is key to preventing the animals'extinction in the wild.
Consumers are urged not to buy timber products made from tiger-inhabited forests, such as Asia Pulp & Paper brands accused by the WWF and Greenpeace of rainforest destruction in Sumatra.
But consumer pressure is unlikely to be enough. One option might be to improve tigers'commercial value in the wild through tourism.
A plan being mooted to save the orangutan an endangered ape that shares territory with tigers, is to charge tourists a hefty"conservation fee  to see them.
Permits to view mountain gorillas in Rwanda cost at least $500. Moral imperativeperhaps the biggest problem with conserving the tigers'habitats,
though, is that the cats typically inhabit the crowded regions of the world most heavily populated by humans,
including India and China. The answer in the Anthropocene, may be assisted migration-to create a new habitat for them in foreign parts.
That's what Li Quan, a former fashion executive is trying to do. Li took two South China tigers
which are extinct in the wild and number less than 60 in captivity oe from zoos in China to a reserve she has created in South africa.
There, she hopes to successfully breed them, allow them to learn the skills of a wild tiger,
and eventually introduce them into reserves back in China. It is an ambitious plan and one that may be helped by findings that captive tigers in China actually retain broad genetic diversity now lost in their fewer wild relatives,
meaning that there is a the possibility of"rewilding  tigers. And this genetic wealth also allows for the option of cloning tigers
should we be reduced to the last few. Ultimately, the reason for conserving tigers may be less to do with their ecosystem or tourist economy benefits,
but simply because they are magnificent creatures. We have a moral and ethical imperative to save them in the wild,
Barnosky contends. I don't want to be part of generation that destroyed the last wild tiger. I too like knowing that there are still tigers living in the wild.
Back in Nepal, I hear the unmistakable sound of bones being crunched by a hefty jaw.
Siteram motions for me to remain still while he tiptoes forward. I can smell the tiger now oe an incredibly strong musky odour,
mixed with the scent of meat oe and I start to sweat and my knees tremble a little.
with fresh blood and chewed up deer bones. It takes a while for my heart to return to its usual pace
he and other scientists are dreaming up ambitious plans to resurrect long-dead animals from pigeons to Tasmanian tigers and wooly mammoths.
From dogs to cows, scientists rushed to clone a menagerie of animals using Wilmut's technique, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT.
In 2007 Japanese scientists reported, first in mice and later in humans, that an adult cell could be reverted to an embryo-like stem cell.
Both feats have been accomplished in mice and they should be possible in other animals, scientists say.
As a first step, Ryder and a team of stem cell scientists have reprogrammed the skin cells from a northern white rhinoceroses named Fatu, one of seven still alive,
and from a drill, a monkey species that lives in tiny, dwindling pockets of west Africa.
And recently, scientists said they have created ips cells from a snow leopard. These cells are a long way from saving species,
I can think of that would prevent the extinction of the northern white rhino, Â Ryder says.
his team is using a similar approach to engineer mice with traits of naked mole rats. The odd-looking rodents live dozens of years instead of a handful like mice.
They are impervious to cancer and do not feel pain from acids. To endow ordinary lab mice with these traits Church will try to partially rewrite the genomes of mouse stem cells.
However, he admits that creating a passenger pigeon from the stem cells of an ordinary pigeon would involve a massive scale up of the same technologies.
Flash-frozen remains of wooly mammoths have been found preserved under the Siberian permafrost, and scientists hope their bones could be a source of DNA-containing marrow cells for cloning.
and predicted they would be able to clone a mammoth within 5 years. They hope to insert nuclei from the mammoth cells into egg cells from its closest living relative, the elephant,
and carry the mammoth embryo in an elephant's womb. However, some scientists have cast doubt about
whether this is possible. Hendrik Poinar, a palaeo-geneticist at Mcmaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and his team have uncovered similarly well-preserved mammoth bones and never found viable cells or nuclei."
"The likelihood of finding an intact cell that can be rejigged to life oe it's not that it's an impossibility oe
 Poinar says that genome engineering offers a more realistic shot at resurrecting woolly mammoths and other long-extinct species. Ten thousand-year-old cells and their nuclei may be degraded too to be used in cloning,
such as the Tasmanian tiger. These genomes exist in the form of computerised data, but they could serve as a blueprint for altering the DNA of a cell from a closely related species. For instance,
the code of a woolly mammoth's genome differs from an African elephant's by roughly 240,000 DNA letters out of a total of 4 billion,
An elephant ips cell engineered to contain those mutations would theoretically be capable of producing woolly mammoth sperm.
the woolly mammoth stem cells could be implanted besides an elephant embryo early in development, producing a chimera animal with some tissues made from elephant cells and others from mammoths.
In some individuals the mammoth cells would contribute to sperm or eggs, and these cells be used to create a genuine mammoth through IVF.
In the absence of a living mammoth, scientists are reconstructing some of its most vital components from DNA fragments to discover how it adapted to life at subzero temperatures.
Scientists could go one step further and test woolly mammoth red blood cells made from ips cells, Poinar says.
Reality check If the idea of mammoths roaming the Earth still sounds a bit farfetched, it should.
Resurrecting a mammoth or indeed any extinct species would require a dizzying list of technological leaps in genome engineering, reproductive biology,
For instance, a recent study found that making a chimeric rhesus monkey oe a process needed to resurrect a monkey species from frozen cells oe is much trickier than a mouse."
and asked Poinar to quit his academic job and work full time on bringing back woolly mammoths.
 Harvard's Church says his goal is not necessarily to fill the planet with mammoths
"If there's enough people enthusiastic about bringing an extinct species like a mammoth or passenger pigeon,
I only have to do it once to drill and sow. Considering that it costs him 9. 9 gallons (45 litres) of fuel an hour for 14-hour days over 2 weeks
#15 Most Bizarre Brain Experiments If the brain is a supercomputer these would be its hacks.
known as the Caltech team, can attach electrodes to your brain that lets you move a mouse cursor with your thoughts.
As this elk of mind-signal reading technology evolves, the day will come when even your dreams arent safe from spying eyes. http://foreign. peacefmonline. com/tech/201010/98495. php 2. Hyperscanning Brain Experiment:
so the birds can learn new songs. http://www. news. harvard. edu/gazette/1998/04. 16/Experimentsrais. html 4. Using immature cells from the brains of mammals to replace dead
Recent experiments show that dead brain cells in mice (which are mammalian like us) can be regenerated with immature brain cells.
ECG Recording Using Perfused Cat Brains and Glycerol Professor Isamu Suda, of Kobe University in Japan, is renowned for devising a cryonics methodology right out of Tales from the Crypt.
Basically, the Suda technique involves deep freezing a live cat brain and then thawing it back out.
/Alcohols-Effects-in-the-Brain&id=1319880 7. Scientists create Mice with Human brain Cells Fred Gage
Gages team has injected successfully mice which are genetic twins to humans, having a 97.5%similarity with human brain cells.
Gages breed of man/mice lab creations are known as chimeras, not unlike the geep (half-goat, half-sheep) or mule (half-ass, half-horse.
citing issue with the resulting creature being oetoo human. http://www. msnbc. msn. com/id/10441350/ns/health-cloning and stem cells 8. Robot powered by rats brain in bizarre British experiment
On the other hand, robots controlled by rat brains now thats an abomination if Ive ever heard of one.
which consist of attaching a chunk of rat brain to a robot to see if it moves The creepy part is that it does move.
as if it was an animal being trained. http://www. dailymail. co. uk/sciencetech/article-1044909/Robot-powered-rats-brain-bizarre-British-experiment. html#ixzz16mpvastz 9. Brain
Dissecting and Cementing Marmosets Brains Scientists crack open the marmosets scull, vacuum out swaths of brain tissue to cause visual blind spots,
The marmoset is strapped to an EEG machine to track brain activity, before being brought in the back
since human brains and marmoset brains are completely different. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Cambridge university primates http://www. humanecharities. org. au/experiments/marmosets. html 11.
oewhat do you call dog and tiger? oei call them dog and tiger. oepencil and brush?
oeoh, theres a word for that. oeairplane and train? oei feel embarrassed I dont know. oeyou have a lot of loss of memory,
The study also found that Wi-fi radiation could inhibit the growth of corn cobs. The researchers urged that further studies were needed to confirm the current results
Beutler identified the gene for the first immune receptor in mammals a mouse gene known as TLR4.
Their overview in Science includes illustrated descriptions of the disease-resistance or immunity pathways in the mouse, Drosophila fruit fly,
#Sharks and Wolves: Prey Interactions Similar On land and in Oceans major predators help control the populations of their prey
which examined the interactions between wolves and elk in the United states, as well as sharks and dugongs in Australia.
In each case, the major predators help control the populations of their prey, scientists said. But through whats been called the oeecology of fear they also affect the behavior of the prey,
and an international expert in the study of large predators such as wolves and cougars. oewere now finding that there are many more similarities between marine and terrestrial ecosystems than weve realized,
what has been learned about wolf and elk interaction in Yellowstone national park in the U s. to the interplay of tiger sharks and dugongs in Shark Bay, Australia.
Dugongs are large marine mammals, similar to manatees, that feed primarily on seagrasses and are a common prey of sharks.
In studies with elk, scientists have found that the presence of wolves alters their behavior almost constantly,
The elk graze less in sensitive habitats, which in Yellowstone is helping streamside shrubs and aspen trees to recover,
along with other positive impacts on beaver dams and wildlife. Conceptually similar activities are taking place between sharks and dugongs, the researchers found.
When sharks are abundant, dugongs graze less in shallow water where they are most vulnerable to sharks,
and sacrifice food they might otherwise consume. This allows the seagrass meadows to thrive, along with the range of other plant and marine animal species that depend on them.
In like fashion, the common wildebeest on the African Serengeti are less vulnerable to attack by lions
or hyenas when their physical condition is good. A more frequent information exchange between terrestrial and marine ecologists could provide additional insights into ecosystem function
to be able to fit all your ingredients (make sure the lid has an airtight seal).
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