The Science Behind an Ape Hug
A hug can say a lot without any words. Hugging might seem like a distinctly human thing, but researchers studying chimpanzees and bonobos found that apes use touch in a similar way.
Scientists observed that apes touch each other — through hugs, pats, and strokes — before stressful situations. In this study, the stressful situation was feeding time. Food is actually one of the biggest sources of conflict among apes, since everyone wants to eat and there's not always enough to go around. Researchers found that apes who touched more before food arrived were more likely to eat peacefully together afterward — no shoving, no squabbling.
This suggests the behavior is old. Really old. Humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos share common ancestors from millions of years ago, so using touch to calm down or bond with others may go back further than we think — to long before our biggest worries were tests and deadlines. Maybe our ancestors were doing something similar before facing down a woolly mammoth.
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You don’t often hear good news about the environment, but here is some. Three very different wildlife projects around the world show that there’s more than one way to protect nature, and that the effort is paying off.
In the UK, a cat named Frank is moving to a new home. He’s the only Asian golden cat in the country, a medium-sized wild cat from the forests of Southeast Asia. Frank is leaving the sanctuary where he’s lived and moving to a habitat built for his species. The difference matters. A sanctuary’s main job is caring for the animals it already has. A purpose-built habitat does that too, but it also works to help the species survive in the future, through research and breeding. At his new home, Frank will join a breeding program. That’s important, because Asian golden cats are listed as Near Threatened, which means they could become endangered soon. In the wild, they’re losing their forest homes and are hunted illegally.
Next stop is Brazil, where about 35,000 humpback whales now swim in the South Atlantic Ocean. That number would have seemed impossible not long ago. Hunting pushed humpbacks close to extinction, and in the 1980s, countries around the world agreed to stop commercial whaling. Four decades later, the whales have made a remarkable comeback. Every year they return to the warm waters off Brazil’s coast to breed and raise their calves, and scientists come back each year to study them.
Finally, in Tasmania, an island state off the south coast of Australia, volunteers are restoring wetlands. They’re pulling out willow trees, which settlers brought from Europe long ago. The willows spread quickly and crowd out local plants, which is what makes them an invasive species. In their place, volunteers are planting native species. Over time, these plants should keep the water cleaner, hold riverbanks in place, and shade the water.
A car called the Hydromax just set a new speed record for hydrogen-powered vehicles, and it didn’t just beat the old mark. It more than doubled it.
The run took place in August at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, a dried-up lake bed whose hard, flat surface has hosted land-speed attempts for more than a century. Behind the wheel was Andy Green, a retired British Royal Air Force pilot and the only person ever to drive a car faster than the speed of sound.
The old record for a car with a hydrogen-burning engine was 185.5 miles per hour, set in 2004. The Hydromax averaged 406.320 mph. Official records are based on the average of two runs, and Green’s two runs clocked in at about 401 and 412 mph.
Will you ever need to drive 406 mph? Probably not, even if Chipotle closes in five minutes and you’re ten minutes away.
The point was to show what hydrogen can do. The Hydromax runs on two hydrogen engines adapted from ones its maker, the British company JCB, uses in construction diggers. Gasoline and diesel engines release carbon dioxide. A hydrogen engine’s main byproduct is water.
There’s a catch, though. Hydrogen is only as clean as the way it’s made, and most of the world’s hydrogen today is still produced using fossil fuels.
Imagine catching your lunch as it falls out of the sky. For Montagu’s harriers, that’s just how dinner works. The male hunts, flies back toward the nest, and drops his catch in midair. The female swoops up and grabs it before it hits the ground. Birdwatchers call this the “food pass,” and it’s one of the most impressive things you’ll see a bird do.
Very few people in Britain get to see it, though. Montagu’s harriers are so rare there that wildlife experts keep the locations of their nests secret. That’s to protect them from people who might disturb the birds or steal their eggs. The population is in serious trouble: for five years in a row, not a single pair of harriers raised chicks anywhere in the UK (the United Kingdom, made up of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).
Secrecy isn’t enough, because harriers have an unusual habit for a bird of prey. They build their nests on the ground, hidden in fields of crops like wheat and barley. Climate change is making crops ripen earlier in the year, so farmers harvest sooner. That means the chicks may not be able to fly yet when the combine harvesters come through. To help, farmers are teaming up with the RSPB (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a major British wildlife charity). They put fences around the nests and leave a patch of crops standing until the young birds can fly.
Surviving the harvest is only the first challenge. Soon after, the harriers leave Britain and fly south for the winter. Scientists already know the adults travel thousands of miles to West Africa, to countries such as Senegal and Mali, on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. What they don’t know is which route the young birds take on their first trip. To find out, researchers have fitted two chicks with tiny satellite trackers. Every flap of the way, the data will help show how these young birds handle one of the toughest journeys in the animal kingdom.
Tim Andrews had end-stage kidney disease, which means his kidneys had almost completely stopped working. Then he got a transplant from a very unexpected donor: a pig.
Your kidneys work like filters. They clean waste and extra water out of your blood, and that waste leaves your body as urine. When the kidneys fail, many patients go on dialysis. A machine filters their blood for them, usually for several hours at a time, a few times a week. Dialysis keeps people alive, but it’s exhausting and takes up a lot of time. Tim depended on it before his transplant. Or, more precisely, before his first transplant.
Tim’s new kidney came from a Yucatán miniature pig, a small breed named after a region in Mexico. The pig had been genetically modified, which means scientists changed some of its genes. These changes made the kidney more like a human one, so Tim’s immune system would be less likely to attack it. Normally, the body treats an organ from another animal as an invader and rejects it. Tim lived for almost nine months without dialysis, longer than any living person who had received a pig kidney before him.
Eventually, Tim went back on dialysis for a short time. Then he received a second transplant, this time a kidney from a human donor. Other people have received pig kidneys, but Tim was the first to go from a pig kidney to a human one.
Living with a pig’s organ might sound strange, but doctors see real promise in it. In the U.S. alone, around 90,000 people are waiting for a kidney transplant, and there aren’t nearly enough human donors. Pig kidneys could one day act as a “bridge,” keeping patients healthy until a human kidney becomes available. Still, this isn’t a solution yet. Researchers are studying how long pig organs can last and whether they’re safe for many more patients.
You don’t often hear good news about the environment, but here is some. Three very different wildlife projects around the world show that there’s more than one way to protect nature, and that the effort is paying off.
In the UK, a cat named Frank is moving to a new home. He’s the only Asian golden cat in the country, a medium-sized wild cat from the forests of Southeast Asia. Frank is leaving the sanctuary where he’s lived and moving to a habitat built for his species. The difference matters. A sanctuary’s main job is caring for the animals it already has. A purpose-built habitat does that too, but it also works to help the species survive in the future, through research and breeding. At his new home, Frank will join a breeding program. That’s important, because Asian golden cats are listed as Near Threatened, which means they could become endangered soon. In the wild, they’re losing their forest homes and are hunted illegally.
Next stop is Brazil, where about 35,000 humpback whales now swim in the South Atlantic Ocean. That number would have seemed impossible not long ago. Hunting pushed humpbacks close to extinction, and in the 1980s, countries around the world agreed to stop commercial whaling. Four decades later, the whales have made a remarkable comeback. Every year they return to the warm waters off Brazil’s coast to breed and raise their calves, and scientists come back each year to study them.
Finally, in Tasmania, an island state off the south coast of Australia, volunteers are restoring wetlands. They’re pulling out willow trees, which settlers brought from Europe long ago. The willows spread quickly and crowd out local plants, which is what makes them an invasive species. In their place, volunteers are planting native species. Over time, these plants should keep the water cleaner, hold riverbanks in place, and shade the water.
A car called the Hydromax just set a new speed record for hydrogen-powered vehicles, and it didn’t just beat the old mark. It more than doubled it.
The run took place in August at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, a dried-up lake bed whose hard, flat surface has hosted land-speed attempts for more than a century. Behind the wheel was Andy Green, a retired British Royal Air Force pilot and the only person ever to drive a car faster than the speed of sound.
The old record for a car with a hydrogen-burning engine was 185.5 miles per hour, set in 2004. The Hydromax averaged 406.320 mph. Official records are based on the average of two runs, and Green’s two runs clocked in at about 401 and 412 mph.
Will you ever need to drive 406 mph? Probably not, even if Chipotle closes in five minutes and you’re ten minutes away.
The point was to show what hydrogen can do. The Hydromax runs on two hydrogen engines adapted from ones its maker, the British company JCB, uses in construction diggers. Gasoline and diesel engines release carbon dioxide. A hydrogen engine’s main byproduct is water.
There’s a catch, though. Hydrogen is only as clean as the way it’s made, and most of the world’s hydrogen today is still produced using fossil fuels.
Imagine catching your lunch as it falls out of the sky. For Montagu’s harriers, that’s just how dinner works. The male hunts, flies back toward the nest, and drops his catch in midair. The female swoops up and grabs it before it hits the ground. Birdwatchers call this the “food pass,” and it’s one of the most impressive things you’ll see a bird do.
Very few people in Britain get to see it, though. Montagu’s harriers are so rare there that wildlife experts keep the locations of their nests secret. That’s to protect them from people who might disturb the birds or steal their eggs. The population is in serious trouble: for five years in a row, not a single pair of harriers raised chicks anywhere in the UK (the United Kingdom, made up of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).
Secrecy isn’t enough, because harriers have an unusual habit for a bird of prey. They build their nests on the ground, hidden in fields of crops like wheat and barley. Climate change is making crops ripen earlier in the year, so farmers harvest sooner. That means the chicks may not be able to fly yet when the combine harvesters come through. To help, farmers are teaming up with the RSPB (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a major British wildlife charity). They put fences around the nests and leave a patch of crops standing until the young birds can fly.
Surviving the harvest is only the first challenge. Soon after, the harriers leave Britain and fly south for the winter. Scientists already know the adults travel thousands of miles to West Africa, to countries such as Senegal and Mali, on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. What they don’t know is which route the young birds take on their first trip. To find out, researchers have fitted two chicks with tiny satellite trackers. Every flap of the way, the data will help show how these young birds handle one of the toughest journeys in the animal kingdom.
Tim Andrews had end-stage kidney disease, which means his kidneys had almost completely stopped working. Then he got a transplant from a very unexpected donor: a pig.
Your kidneys work like filters. They clean waste and extra water out of your blood, and that waste leaves your body as urine. When the kidneys fail, many patients go on dialysis. A machine filters their blood for them, usually for several hours at a time, a few times a week. Dialysis keeps people alive, but it’s exhausting and takes up a lot of time. Tim depended on it before his transplant. Or, more precisely, before his first transplant.
Tim’s new kidney came from a Yucatán miniature pig, a small breed named after a region in Mexico. The pig had been genetically modified, which means scientists changed some of its genes. These changes made the kidney more like a human one, so Tim’s immune system would be less likely to attack it. Normally, the body treats an organ from another animal as an invader and rejects it. Tim lived for almost nine months without dialysis, longer than any living person who had received a pig kidney before him.
Eventually, Tim went back on dialysis for a short time. Then he received a second transplant, this time a kidney from a human donor. Other people have received pig kidneys, but Tim was the first to go from a pig kidney to a human one.
Living with a pig’s organ might sound strange, but doctors see real promise in it. In the U.S. alone, around 90,000 people are waiting for a kidney transplant, and there aren’t nearly enough human donors. Pig kidneys could one day act as a “bridge,” keeping patients healthy until a human kidney becomes available. Still, this isn’t a solution yet. Researchers are studying how long pig organs can last and whether they’re safe for many more patients.