Clever Puzzle-Solving Orangutans.

Alex

Orangutans are really smart - either that or they've read Aesop's Fable.

Faced with a vertical transparent tube, a quarter filled with water, in which a peanut floats tantalizingly beyond reach, what should you do? Five orang-utans from Leipzig Zoo in Germany all came to the same conclusion. Taking mouthfuls of water from a nearby bottle, they spat into the tube until the peanut floated into reach.

The apes' ingenuity amazed the study's leader, Natacha Mendes from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "Before we started we thought this was really complicated," she says. "If you asked someone in an office to solve this problem many people wouldn't be able to give a quick answer, and some probably wouldn't be able to figure it out at all."

Mmmm... peanuts... http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070702/full/070702-7.html


Comments (3)

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This makes me remember a puzzle game which demonstrates that children passed the test better than their parents.

In fact, the explanation was that children don't have a lot of knowledge about physics, etc... So they're looking for a direct answer, the simpliest one.

but for most problems, we need a lot of knowledge and abilities to abstract the details and that is very difficult for children.

Maybe it's the same process here with animals ... a direct solution, so the test choice is very important and do not demonstrate great abilities.

Maybe if we live in a forest with hollow trees and a lot of water due to rains we would find this solution very quickly, it's just a matter of environment.
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You know, they kinda left out how firefox also tops the overall use of browsers... so its not really a big surprise when that goes hand in hand with topping most people complaining
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Yeah...I'm pretty sure this is reliable news...

Firefox may have more vulnerabilities, but how many are fixed straight away? How long between a report of a problem and when it is fixed? What about zero-day issues?

This company needs to ditch the generalities and do comprehensive research before making these conclusions.
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Firefox is very insecure. It's always telling me, "Look at me! I'm infinitely customizable through add-ons! Put your tabs on the side in tree-style! Play music right in the browser! Live bookmarks! No one else has 'em!" ;-)

Seriously, I love Firefox. Just fix the memory leaks, please.

AdBlock and NoScript FTW.
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I really like firefox, and it's my main browser for school, but I prefer Opera. It's faster, it comes with built in IMAP and POP mail, it has its own chat client, and you can import more kinds of bookmarks. Oh, and the fact that it looks nice is just a bonus.
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@1: Uh, they did it by percentages. You understand percentages, don't you?

I love Firefox, but it's very true that the plugin technology has opened up some vulnerabilities.

And guys: You can be a fan of a product without being a closed-minded shill.
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so they count the number of reported vulnerabilities and from that number conclude the "secure-ness" of a program... I know a way to make the whole world of IT secure at an instant: stop reporting vulnerabilities!

No reports, 100% security!

right?
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