theweekmagazine:

Meet Santino, a super-smart chimpanzee living in the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden who has received a lot of attention lately for his learned ability to outsmart his human spectators.

One day in 2010, Santino was apparently fed up with being ogled, so he scared visitors away by aggressively flinging stones. (No one was hit.) Later that same day, when a different group of people approached his pen, the chimp came up with a new idea. “Santino approached them holding two stones, but this time appearing nonaggressive and munching on an apple.” When he got close enough, the sly primate let the rocks fly, taking the humans by surprise. 

In a new study published in the journal PLoS One, researchers suggest that the chimp’s deceptions hint at a deep level of thinking once only associated with humans. 

infoneer-pulse:

Massive underground reserves of water found in Africa

Huge reserves of underground water in some of the driest parts of Africa could provide a buffer against the effects of climate change for years to come, scientists said.

Researchers from the British Geological Survey and University College London have for the first time mapped the aquifers, or groundwater, across the continent and the amount they hold.

‘The largest groundwater volumes are found in the large sedimentary aquifers in the North African countries Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan,’ the scientists said in their paper.

They estimate that reserves of groundwater across the continent are 100 times the amount found on its surface, or 0.66 million cubic kilometres.

» via Daily Mail

take-nothing-but-photos:

Giant crabs make Antarctic leap

Up to a million king crabs are discovered on the edge of Antarctica, probably carried by warm water, raising fears for the local ecosystem.

The researchers sent the Genesis, a submersible remotely operated vehicle (ROV) from the University of Ghent in Belgium, into the Palmer Deep in March last year.

The idea was to look at what life was down there, rather than specifically to look for crabs; and the team was somewhat surprised by how many they found.

Judging by the density of the crabs and their tracks, the scientists estimate there may be 1.5 million crabs in the basin.

A female crab retrieved from the area was found to be carrying mature eggs and larvae.

“Our best guess is there was an event, or maybe more than one, where warmer water flushed up across the shelf and carried some of the larvae into the basin,” said project leader Craig Smith from the University of Hawaii.

cwnl:

Rivers of Melting Ice Mapped in Antarctica

The first-ever map of how Antarctica’s ice is moving across that continent has been created by researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

The map, along with an associated animation developed by NASA, reveals that ice is flowing fastest in coastal ice shelves and their tributaries, shown in this illustration in bright purple and blue. Though it’s ice that’s moving, not water, “you can imagine it like a river system,” says Bernd Scheuchl, one of the map’s creators. The fastest ice flows out to sea at a rate of a few kilometers a year. Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers on the west coast are the most active.

The team was surprised by how far inland they found fast-moving ice, Scheuchl says. So, if Antarctica loses a great deal of its coastal ice to climate change in the coming decades, large quantities of interior ice could follow. “That’s critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise,” NASA polar scientist Thomas Wagner said in a prepared statement.

To create this view of Antarctic ice flow, the UC Irvine researchers relied on data from satellites operated by Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency. Flow was tracked from 2007 to 2009 during a period of intense scientific monitoring of Earth’s poles that researchers all over the world had agreed to do. A report on the map was published online August 18 in Science.

Journal Reference: Science

cwnl:

Psilocybin Mushrooms Confirmed As Anxiety Battling Drug

Terminally ill cancer patients struggling with anxiety may get some relief from a guided “trip” on the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, a new study suggests.

The study included 12 patients who took a small dose of psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — while under the supervision of trained therapists. In a separate session, the participants took a placebo pill, which had little effect on their symptoms.

By contrast, one to three months after taking psilocybin the patients reported feeling less anxious and their overall mood had improved. By the six-month mark, the group’s average score on a common scale used to measure depression had declined by 30 percent, according to the study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Can psychedelic drugs treat depression?

In follow-up interviews with the researchers, some patients said their experience with psilocybin gave them a new perspective on their illness and brought them closer to family and friends. “We were pleased with the results,” says the lead researcher, Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, in Torrance, Calif.

Notably, the psilocybin did not aggravate the patients’ anxiety or provoke any other unwanted effects besides a slight increase in blood pressure and heart rate.

Read More

nationalpost:

Smiling men are the least attractive: study
The axiom that nice guys finish last has received new validation in the form of a Canadian study that suggests women are less sexually attracted to men who smile.

The University of British Columbia study found that women were least attracted to smiling, happy men, preferring those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed.

On the other hand, men were most sexually attracted to women who looked happy, and least attracted to women who appeared proud and confident.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Emotion, is the first to show that women are sexually attracted to a brooding hulk, while men are sexually attracted to a smiling beauty.

“We know that women like the bad boy. The James Dean, Edward the vampire — all these guys who are very broody, we know that women find them attractive,” said Jessica Tracy, the study’s lead researcher. (Photo: Reuters)

Neat article sans the Twilight reference.