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Some jobs could be done by a trained monkey. So it’s all the more impressive that an untrained monkey on a farm in India herds 75 goats out to and back from the fields every day. National Geographic reports:
Martin K, Estate Manager- “She takes out the goats for grazing and brings them back. A shepherd is usually required to accompany the goats all day long and bring them back in these hills. But because of her, manpower can be spared. She is as good as a shepherd. The only thing is that she does not speak, but otherwise carries out all responsibilities.”
They say they feel confident that the goats will be safe when Mani accompanies them.
Mani is said to make a strange sound when she discovers a goat is missing or when danger lurks.
There’s a (non-embeddable) video of the monkey at the link.
image by flickr user eirikref used under creative commons license
Results from a 20 year study on monkeys and their diets show that eating fewer calories can help you live longer. Animals with a restricted diet of 30% were shown to outlive those that were given the freedom to eat what when and how much they wanted. The monkeys also had improved chances of avoiding age related diseases, cancer, diabetes and brain atrophy.
In terms of overall animal health, Weindruch notes, the restricted diet leads to longer lifespan and improved quality of life in old age. “There is a major effect of caloric restriction in increasing survival if you look at deaths due to the diseases of aging,” he says.
The incidence of cancerous tumors and cardiovascular disease in animals on a restricted diet was less than half that seen in animals permitted to eat freely. Remarkably, while diabetes or impaired glucose regulation is common in monkeys that can eat all they want, it has yet to be observed in any animal on a restricted diet. “So far, we’ve seen the complete prevention of diabetes,” says Weindruch.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
People, meet your new grammar Nazi: a study by Harvard University linguist Ansgar Endress has revealed that monkeys can recognize poor grammar!
For their study, Endress and colleagues played recordings of made-up English words to a population of captive cotton-top tamarins for roughly 30 minutes a day.
Half of the tamarins were exposed to words with a varied stem but a constant suffix (such as bi-shoy, mo-shoy, and lu-shoy). The other half were exposed to a constant prefix followed by a varied stem (such as shoy-bi, shoy-mo, and shoy-lu). [...]
When tamarins were exposed to words that "broke" the rules they had learned, they looked toward the speaker in a startled manner, observers noted.
The finding is dramatic, Endress explained, because it reveals that our distant cousins seem to have the mental machinery to identify verbal structures like suffixes and prefixes.
The concept behind the cute Monkey Kick Off Flash game from Miniclip is maddeningly simple: just press a key or click your mouse button to get the monkey to kick the ball. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is … except when you’re trying to beat someone else’s score.
See if you can beat my top score (4194, which is woefully low as compared to the top players of Monkey Kick Off): Link
Obama’s pesky fly has got nothing on this: Zambian President Rupiah Banda got peed on by a monkey during a news conference!
Mr Banda was not peeved, making light of the rude interruption as he sat under a tree in State House grounds.
Journalists laughed as Mr Banda jokingly remonstrated with the offender: "You [monkey] have urinated on my jacket."
"Perhaps these are blessings," he said, looking up at the animal in the tree.
BBC has the video clip: Link
Happy Bloomsday, everyone! For those of us who aren’t hardcore James Joyce fans, today is the day that honors the Irish author (we’ll get to that in a second). It’s not an official holiday, but that doesn’t make it any less serious to those who celebrate it. Here are the details behind Bloomsday and seven other academic holidays you can celebrate.
Just about any kid who took chemistry in high school has participated in a Mole Day or two. To celebrate Avogadro’s constant, 6.02×10 to the 23rd power, chemistry teachers across the country make their students roll into school at 6:02 a.m. on October 23 for extra credit. At least, my chemistry teacher did. Avogadro’s constant, by the way, defines the number of particles in a mole, hence Mole Day. What you do to celebrate Mole Day really depends on the teacher – it can be anything from creating a poster for Mole Day to consuming a mole of water to creating cheesy mole jokes (Who was Avogadro’s favorite character on M*A*S*H*? Father Molecahy, of course).
Picture from MoleDay.org.
You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
Why May 25? It really has no significance to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason seems to be that fans wanted to honor Adams shortly after his death the 25th was chosen because it was exactly two weeks later. The date stuck, but TowelDay.org points out this lovely coincidence – “As the universe that Douglas Adams created was full of absurdity and randomness, it may be a fitting choice after all. And if you need an additional reason: if you add the hexadecimal numbers 25 and 5, and convert the result to decimal, you get 42!” Forty two being the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, of course.
Photo from Beny Shlevich.
Yeah, Tolkien’s so important he gets two days. March 25 is known as Tolkien Reading Day, but it’s also the day of the fall of Sauron. The Tolkien Society encourages fans to get together and read out loud while enjoying a hot toasted bun and a warm drink “in hobbitish comfort.”
Picture from TolkienSociety.org.
Although this is another mathematical day, it’s a bit more rare than the others: it only occurs when the month and day are the square roots of the last two digits of the year. We had one this year – 03/03/09 – but the next one won’t happen on the calendar until 04/04/16. In fact, there are only nine of them every century: 01/01/01, 02/02/04, 03/03/09, 04/04/16, 05/05/25, 06/06/36, 07/07/49, 08/08/64 and 09/09/81 (I know, you could have figured that out on your own. The first one was celebrated on September 9, 1981, created by a high school teacher named Ron Gordon. Nearly 28 years later, he still serves as the national publicist for Square Root Day and suggests that people commemorate the occasion by consuming radishes or other root vegetables cut into squares.
Monkey Day, December 14, was created just nine years ago by art students at Michigan State. It celebrates exactly what it sounds like it celebrates: namely, simians. What is there to celebrate about monkeys, you might ask? Lots, according to the Monkey Day website. There’s medical research, animal rights, and that whole evolution thing. But mostly, it’s a day to dress up like a monkey, talk like a monkey, and maybe donate some money to your favorite monkey-related charity. And drink, I imagine. Whatever the reason behind El Dia de Mono, it has some pretty powerful fans: Peter Jackson chose the day to release King Kong in 2005.
Picture from MonkeyDay.com.
Since Osamu Shimomura discovered Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) in jellyfish back in the 1960s (his work earned him the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry along with Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien), the science of biology has never been the same. Since then, this incredibly useful tool (I even used it in my dissertation way back when) has found its way to transgenic pigs, dogs, and even cats.
NatGeo News has a nifty photo gallery of the various "glowing" animals – some of which crossed the line from science into commerce (the fluorescent GloFish). This one above is the GFP Rhesus Macaque Monkey, used to study Huntington’s disease by researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta.
Link – Thanks Marilyn!
Macaque monkeys in Lopburi, Thailand, were observed apparently teaching their young how to floss. These particular monkeys used human hair from visitors to the shrine. Because the visitors view the monkeys as divine servants, they allow them to pluck their hair.
Japanese researchers, led by Nobuo Masataka of the University at Kyoto, focused on 7 female Macaque’s each with one year old infants:
“I was surprised because teaching techniques on using tools properly to a third party are said to be an activity carried out only by humans,” he said.
The study focused on the observation of seven female long-tailed macaques and interaction with their off spring at a colony of monkeys near Bangkok in Thailand.
The practice of teeth flossing doubled and became significantly more elaborate when they were in the presence of infant monkeys, suggesting that they were attempting to teach the technique to the young.
“The study is still at the hypothesis stage,” said Professor Masataka.
“We would like to shift our focus to the baby monkeys to check whether the mothers’ actions are effectively helping them learn how to clean their teeth.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. And in this case, with a coconut. Here’s the story of a monkey named Brother Kwan, who was overworked by his master climbing trees and fetching coconuts to sell:
The newspaper said that Leilit Janchoom, 48, had beaten the monkey whenever he showed any hesitance to climb a tree.
The owner was insistent because he got the equivalent of 4p for every coconut picked.
But the monkey – it is claimed – apparently found the work boring, strenuous and unrewarding.
So, the monkey chucked a well-aimed coconut on Janchoom, and killed him!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by see_you_@_de_pawty_Richter.
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