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Orang-utan gestures get the message across
Research news and discovery
DAVID SANGER/DRR.NET
In brief– Make it snappy
One word… it’s curved, it’s yellow, and you eat it! GINA gestured for the banana. When Erica offered her a stick of celery instead, single mother Gina, 42, impatiently gestured again. When Erica held up the banana, Gina clapped. She’s better behaved than Theodora, a feisty teenager who throws sand when she is misunderstood. Gina and Theodora are orang-utans, two of six females that have now been found to communicate with gestures in the same way as people do when playing the game charades. Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne at the University of St Andrews, UK, presented the apes with a tasty and
not-so-tasty food item that could only be reached with human help. As in charades, when the orangs’ signals were completely misunderstood, they broadened the range of signals used and avoided the one that had “failed”. When they were partially understood – when they were offered celery instead of a banana, for example – they narrowed down the range of signals used and repeated them (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/jcub.2007.06.069). “It’s similar to what you’d see in young children,” says Cartmill, who designed the experiment to study whether the animals could modify their communication when misunderstood. “The charades strategy is a powerful way of selecting effective signals and getting at a specific meaning,” she says.
Radio? You think we still use radio? ALIEN-hunters hoping to eavesdrop on extraterrestrial TV may be in for disappointment. It has been suggested that the next generation of radio telescopes, such as LOFAR, now being built in the Netherlands, could be used to detect radio noise from alien radio and TV. So Marko Horvat, a computer scientist at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, calculated the 16 | NewScientist | 4 August 2007
odds of detecting alien civilisations of different lifespans from their radio signals. If, for example, 10 civilisations, each with a lifespan of 250,000 years, live within radio reach of Earth, the probability that one of them will be detected is about 9 per cent. That sounds good, but it assumes we have near-perfect telescopes scanning the entire sky constantly – an ideal far from
being realised. “We need much better telescopes,” Horvat says. Worse still, if there are 10 alien civilisations with a much longer lifespan, the chances of detection drop to almost zero (www.arxiv. org/abs/0707.0011). That’s because they will probably have developed better means of communication. “We need the civilisations to die out quickly and rapidly be replaced by new shortlived ones for the maximum chance of detection,” he says. “It’s a very pessimistic conclusion.”
BLINK and you miss it. A lowly termite, Termes panamensis, snaps its jaws at a speed that tops any other muscle-powered movement on Earth. By filming the termite’s jaws at 40,000 frames per second, Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama showed that they achieved a speed of 70.4 metres per second – albeit over a distance of only 1.76 millimetres. Threatened by an intruder, the termite jams its mouthparts against each other using four sets of muscles so big that they fill half the space inside the insect’s head. The pent-up force is what allows it to snap its jaws past one another at such speed in the intruder’s face. This helps a termite defend its nest in the restricted space of the animals’ burrows, Seid and Niven told the International Congress of Neuroethology in Vancouver, Canada.
New MS gene, 30 years on IT HAS been a long time coming, but a new gene linked to multiple sclerosis has finally been identified – the first in 30 years. In MS, the body’s own immune system attacks and destroys myelin, the fatty insulation on the brain’s communication wires. Simon Gregory at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues focused on a gene on chromosome 5 called IL7R and found that one of its variants increases the risk of MS by 20 to 30 per cent. The variant seems to affect the production of interleukin 7 (IL7), an immunesystem enhancer, causing fewer IL7 receptors to be made. This in turn may affect immune cell differentiation, maintenance and proliferation (Nature Genetics, DOI: 10.1038/ng2103). www.newscientist.com
DAVID SANGER/DRR.NET
In brief– Make it snappy
One word… it’s curved, it’s yellow, and you eat it! GINA gestured for the banana. When Erica offered her a stick of celery instead, single mother Gina, 42, impatiently gestured again. When Erica held up the banana, Gina clapped. She’s better behaved than Theodora, a feisty teenager who throws sand when she is misunderstood. Gina and Theodora are orang-utans, two of six females that have now been found to communicate with gestures in the same way as people do when playing the game charades. Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne at the University of St Andrews, UK, presented the apes with a tasty and
not-so-tasty food item that could only be reached with human help. As in charades, when the orangs’ signals were completely misunderstood, they broadened the range of signals used and avoided the one that had “failed”. When they were partially understood – when they were offered celery instead of a banana, for example – they narrowed down the range of signals used and repeated them (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/jcub.2007.06.069). “It’s similar to what you’d see in young children,” says Cartmill, who designed the experiment to study whether the animals could modify their communication when misunderstood. “The charades strategy is a powerful way of selecting effective signals and getting at a specific meaning,” she says.
Radio? You think we still use radio? ALIEN-hunters hoping to eavesdrop on extraterrestrial TV may be in for disappointment. It has been suggested that the next generation of radio telescopes, such as LOFAR, now being built in the Netherlands, could be used to detect radio noise from alien radio and TV. So Marko Horvat, a computer scientist at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, calculated the 16 | NewScientist | 4 August 2007
odds of detecting alien civilisations of different lifespans from their radio signals. If, for example, 10 civilisations, each with a lifespan of 250,000 years, live within radio reach of Earth, the probability that one of them will be detected is about 9 per cent. That sounds good, but it assumes we have near-perfect telescopes scanning the entire sky constantly – an ideal far from
being realised. “We need much better telescopes,” Horvat says. Worse still, if there are 10 alien civilisations with a much longer lifespan, the chances of detection drop to almost zero (www.arxiv. org/abs/0707.0011). That’s because they will probably have developed better means of communication. “We need the civilisations to die out quickly and rapidly be replaced by new shortlived ones for the maximum chance of detection,” he says. “It’s a very pessimistic conclusion.”
BLINK and you miss it. A lowly termite, Termes panamensis, snaps its jaws at a speed that tops any other muscle-powered movement on Earth. By filming the termite’s jaws at 40,000 frames per second, Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama showed that they achieved a speed of 70.4 metres per second – albeit over a distance of only 1.76 millimetres. Threatened by an intruder, the termite jams its mouthparts against each other using four sets of muscles so big that they fill half the space inside the insect’s head. The pent-up force is what allows it to snap its jaws past one another at such speed in the intruder’s face. This helps a termite defend its nest in the restricted space of the animals’ burrows, Seid and Niven told the International Congress of Neuroethology in Vancouver, Canada.
New MS gene, 30 years on IT HAS been a long time coming, but a new gene linked to multiple sclerosis has finally been identified – the first in 30 years. In MS, the body’s own immune system attacks and destroys myelin, the fatty insulation on the brain’s communication wires. Simon Gregory at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues focused on a gene on chromosome 5 called IL7R and found that one of its variants increases the risk of MS by 20 to 30 per cent. The variant seems to affect the production of interleukin 7 (IL7), an immunesystem enhancer, causing fewer IL7 receptors to be made. This in turn may affect immune cell differentiation, maintenance and proliferation (Nature Genetics, DOI: 10.1038/ng2103). www.newscientist.com