Today’s Kindle Sample #11

On entering a forest where chimpanzees live, you will immediately notice loud pant-hoots and perhaps drumming on trees. If you follow these sounds, you may encounter a group of twenty or more chimpanzees on the ground or in the trees – including females with melon-sized pink genital swellings, and males gathering round them and waiting in turn. Excitement and aggression among the males will cause charging displays in which they drag branches and throw rocks. You will also see females nursing infants on their bellies, and juveniles and adolescents engaging in play sessions with raucous laughter. But if you stay in the forest for many days, you will encounter much smaller groups and even lone individuals feeding quietly in the forest.

“Of Genes and Apes” by Anne E. Pusey in Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution by Frans B.M. de Waal, ed.

Stick A Dome On It

Having a skyline one can taste, or living in a city where no one can distinguish the smoke from a burning building and human-generated smog, is bad enough. Spending ridiculous amounts of money to sidestep the issue of overuse of coal due to industrialization is so very western.

The biggest ticket item is a huge dome that looks like a cross between the Biosphere and an overgrown wedding tent. Two of them recently went up at the International School of Beijing, one with six tennis courts, another large enough to harbor kids playing soccer and badminton and shooting hoops simultaneously Friday afternoon.

The contraptions are held up with pressure from the system pumping in fresh air. Your ears pop when you go in through one of three revolving doors that maintain a tight air lock.

The anti-pollution dome is the joint creation of a Shenzhen-based manufacturer of outdoor enclosures and a California company, Valencia-based UVDI, that makes air filtration and disinfection systems for hospitals, schools, museums and airports, including the new international terminal at Los Angeles International Airport.

Dogs And Chimps And Humans

Can dogs do calculus? Are humans more like bonobos or chimps? It seems humans breed themselves animal in-groups, which then compensate for smaller numbers and overall physical frailty and lack of special skills (of course, that was before the X-Men).

Looking at a special adaptation in dogs to be sensitive to human forms of communication,” co-author Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told Discovery News. “There is multiple evidence suggesting that selection pressures during domestication have changed dogs such that they are perfectly adapted to their new niche, the human environment.”

Dogs may even be born with this inherent gift, since 6-week-old puppies with no major training possess it.

For the study, Kaminski and her colleagues compared how well chimpanzees and dogs understood human pointing. The person pointed at a visible object out of reach of the human but within reach of the animal subject. If the chimp or dog retrieved the object, he or she would be rewarded with a tasty food treat. (Chimps received fruit juice or peanuts, while dogs got dry dog food.)