Monkeys.
Awesome.
Goes without saying, really, but if we needed any more proof then there’s a new study out in Nature Communications which gives these blighters even more cudos.
A study of seven “highly social and cooperative capuchin monkeys watched two actors interact,” reported Time magazine.
The actors either helped each other retrieve a toy from a jar, or didn’t. They then offered a treat to the capuchin, which had been trained to only take food from one person.
Turns out that when the actors helped each other, the capuchins had no preference over which person they’d go to for a treat – but if one of the people had been observed not to have helped the other, the capuchin snubbed them for being selfish.
This, said researchers, indicated that selfishness was perceived as a negative trait by the monkeys, who took it as a sign of dangerousness. As capuchins rely on cooperation in the wild, choosing partners who will work together for the common good is a vital trait and probably arose evolutionarily. It has also been observed in chimps and three month old human kids.
Tufts University wins the most spammily-titled research paper of the week for Ectopic Eyes Outside the Head in Xenopus Tadpoles Provide Sensory Data For Light-Mediated Learning. Even better, the authors removed embryo eye cells from frog tadpoles and then grafted them onto their butts (the tadpoles’, not the scientists. That would be weird.) Turns out that if these grafted eye cells are plugged into the spinal column, the tadpoles could still react to light sources in the same way as non-messed-about-with ones.
Fat people eat food
Talking of spam, recently researchers in 228 census areas of Los Angeles and New Orleans recorded food ads whilst another group rang up 2,881 of the residents asking for height and weight info. Possibly unsurprisingly, reported the BMC Public Health Journal, “For every 10 per cent increase in food advertisements, the odds of being obese increased by 5 per cent.”
Which is all well and good, but Weekender would also like to point out that fatties like eating and therefore said advertising is just an example of the food industry knowing its demographic.
Finally, following our revelation last week that pop nutter Peter Gabriel wants animals to be able to connect to the Internet, a slightly more worrying development has been announced in the opening up of RoboEarth – the Internet for robots to talk to each other.
Now they claim that this is useful in robot learning in that, say, a robot cleaner can upload maps of its surroundings so that those who come after it won’t have to learn the layout from scratch. Rapyuta, the RoboEarth Cloud Engine, allows this heavy computation to be moved into the cloud, meaning on-board computation is reduced. Drones and self-driving cars could benefit from this, say those involved in the project.
And all this time we thought Terminator was fiction. Dios mio.
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