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New World Monkeys are the strangest-looking primates on Earth — and they all look nothing like each other, from the bald-headed, demon-like Uakari to the lion-maned golden marmoset to the massively mustachioed emperor tamarin up top. What's behind this insane variety? More »
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Oxytocin is a hormone found to be crucial in the formation of loving bonds between mothers and babies, and it's thought to just generally makes people feel more sympathetic and connected to each other. That's definitely true of rhesus monkeys. More »
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Scientists have trained monkeys to meditate with marshmallows. This is a gift from both the comedy and the alliteration gods, but it's also a valuable medical technique. More »
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A new monkey Shakespeare simulator has risen, and has managed to get through a good ninety-nine percent of Shakespeare's works. Why has this new challenger done so well when others have failed? More »
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In my unceasing quest to bring you the best of the worst of martial arts cinema, here is a battle scene from the 1976 Taiwanese film Monkey King With 72 Magic, an adaptation of the Chinese folktale Journey to the West. This shit is indubitably bananas. More »
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A group of brown capuchin monkeys will be the lucky targets of the world's first non-human targeted advertising campaign. Their responses will provide evidence as to whether humans are the only sickeningly suggestible primates in the world. More »
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There once was a noble project meant to recreate a famous hypothetical. Find out how many pages of Shakespeare monkeys actually could come up with in 10^35 pages. More »
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Time is running out for the red colubus monkey, which lives in Uganda's Kibale National Park. Chimpanzees appear to be huntings these poor guys to death. It's the first time that one primate species has overhunted another, without humans being involved. More »
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Even though they're one of our more distantly related primate cousins, macaque monkeys keep revealing remarkably human-like abilities. First they displayed self-awareness, and now it turns out they can count...but only if they don't get to eat what they're counting. More »
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Could another species someday replace us as Earth's dominant intelligent life and, if so, which species? To answer that question, we need to understand just what intelligence really is. And why, from an evolutionary standpoint, an organism would even want it. More »
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Self-awareness, the ability to assess and even doubt one's own thoughts, is a crucial sign of intelligence, but it's also one of the hardest traits to identify. Macaques have now demonstrated they have self-awareness...which might explain our own evolutionary story. More »
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Some monkeys in a British zoo have been getting up to some very unusual behavior. They cover their eyes with their hands when the Sun isn't even shining down on them, and they keep their eyes open the whole time, suggesting this isn't a physical reaction but actually a form of social interaction. The zookeepers suspect the monkeys are actually telling their peers to leave them alone, essentially making a "Don't Disturb" sign with their hands. Even more intriguingly, these particular mandrill monkeys are the only members of their species that display this behavior, suggesting the gesture is purely social in nature, something that's very rare outside humans. Check out the full story at LiveScience. More »
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You may have heard of the famed monkey waiters of The Kayabukiya Tavern north of Tokyo, but have you ever seen the monkeys don lifeless human masks? Writers of the blog Budget Trouble stopped by the restaurant last year and were sufficiently rattled by their masquerading attendant: More »
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We submit for your viewing pleasure Animals In Rocket Flight, a 1953 Department of Defense film about mice and monkeys experiencing a harrowing rocket ride. Fast forward to 9:15 for zero gravity mice. [Public Resource via Airboyd] More »
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These fluffy, blue-faced monkeys from northern China reveal how extreme cuddliness evolved as a survival trait. More »
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Protests from animal rights activists have put a moratorium on NASA plans to expose 27 squirrel monkeys to gamma-ray radiation. Researchers hoped to simulate the effects of space radiation on humans, but protesters claim the experiment's cruel and unnecessary. More »
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Researchers in Japan are celebrating a step forward in treating spinal injuries. A monkey whose spinal cord was severed at the neck has partially recovered with the use of stem cells. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5709879&view=rss&microfeed=true Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, the non-lethal ape predecessor to HIV, might just be much older than current estimates, which peg it at only a few hundred years old. Research published in this week's Science shows the virus is at least 32,000 years old, and may even have been around for a million years. By analyzing simians that had been geographically isolated from mainland Africa for more than 10,000 years, they found significantly different versions of the virus, which they compared to already known variants in order to better understand the rate of mutation. Their evidence shows that the disease mutates much slower than previously thought, pushing back the origin to tens of thousands of years, and hinting that HIV might not mutate into a non-lethal form for a very long time. More »
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Charlton Heston's ape overlords may have spoken English, but telling those damn dirty apes to get their stinking paws off of you can be said in any tongue. Here are Planet of the Apes comic covers from around the globe. More »
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Watch this video and behold the future. The monkey in the far right of the frame has a brain-computer interface that allows him to control a highly-advanced robotic arm with his thoughts. Soon, humans will be doing the same. More »
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For mid-20th century DC Comics, there was one surefire way to raise sales: Stick an ape on the cover and make readers ask why. And it still works! Go on - pretend you don't want to read these stories. More »
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Monkeys made it into space before humans ever broke the atmosphere, and now they might beat us to Mars. Russia is considering a program to train monkeys to work with robots for the long flight to Mars. More »
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Director Sugimoto Kousuke creates action-packed, animated music videos overloaded with colorful visuals and global disasters. His "The TV Show" goes from hypnotically zen to multiversal meltdown, while "Full Moon Party" chronicles the rise and fall of civilization starring monkey kind. More »
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While other primates have exhibited simple vocabularies, it has long been believed that syntax, the construction of sentences, was unique to humans. But a recent study suggests that at least one species of monkey communicates in vocalized sentences. More »
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It's not quite a supersoldier serum, but researchers have increased strength and muscle mass in monkeys with a small genetic tweak. And human trials for the technique are just on the horizon. More »
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In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, music bridged the gap between worlds, but music may not actually be the key to interspecies communication. Researchers have found that tamarin monkeys don't respond to human music, only music created for monkeys. More »
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Four baby monkeys each have three parents — proving that you could have more than two, but also that that mitochondrial swapping can breed out genetic diseases once and for all. But why stop at three parents? More »
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Chet Phillips imagines an alternate Victorian Era that's not only filled with rayguns and steam-powered contraptions, but also shows that technology being operated by furry-faced monkeys. More »
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The monkeys in the U.S. space program might seem like an odd subject for an animated film, especially since scientists killed a ton of them in the process. In fact, the first six monkeys, uninspiringly named Albert I through Albert VI, all died either in flight, on impact, or right after landing. Not exactly your Saturday matinee popcorn fare, but later this year we'll have both a Space Chimps movie in theaters, and a video game featuring this crazy family of monkey astronauts. More »
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