Monkey justice
Don鈥檛 try to cheat a monkey. Capuchins have a strong sense of justice and will throw a tantrum if given a raw deal. The discovery confirmed the idea that cooperative behaviour, which relies on participants having a sense of fair play, appeared early in our evolutionary past.
Gas comes to life
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It was life Jim, but not as we know it. Physicists created blobs of gaseous plasma that grow, replicate and communicate 鈥� fulfilling many of the traditional requirements for biological cells. The blobs formed in microseconds, challenging the idea that living cells took millions of years to evolve.
Flora and fauna of old
The oldest DNA yet authenticated was recovered intact from Siberian permafrost, revealing shrubs, trees and mosses that lived 400,000 years ago, and mammals such as the woolly mammoth, bison and musk ox that roamed the steppes 30,000 years ago.
Chimp chatter
He walks and he talks. And he is a chimp. Captive bonobo Kanzi surprised his trainers by making sounds they said could unequivocally be interpreted as words. His spoken demands for bananas and grapes challenge the view that humans have a monopoly on language.
Evolutionary hiccup
Why do we hiccup? It turns out we have inherited an ancient brain circuit once vital to our primitive gill-breathing ancestors 鈥� which looked rather like tadpoles. Instead of applying the brain circuitry to ventilate gills, newborn babies now use it to help perform more complex tasks such as suckling.
Virtual thoughts
The world鈥檚 first brain prosthesis, an artificial hippocampus, underwent its first tests hooked up to slices of rat brain. Similar silicon chip implants might one day be used to repair brain damage due to stroke or Alzheimer鈥檚.