Remote sensing used to map habitat of monkey with hominid-like behavior
Cardiff, UK (SPX) Oct 09, 2015 -
Biologists and psychologists are fascinated by the bearded capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus) of northeastern Brazil, which exhibit behavior that is extremely rare in the animal kingdom: they use stone tools to crack open the hard casings of palm nuts, to eat the meat inside.
Scientists eager to study this behavior - especially interesting because it resembles the stone tool use of ear ...
more
How the brain's wiring leads to cognitive control
Philadelphia PA (SPX) Oct 09, 2015 -
How does the brain determine which direction to let its thoughts fly? Looking for the mechanisms behind cognitive control of thought, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, University of California and United States Army Research Laboratory have used brain scans to shed new light on this question.
By using structural imaging techniques to convert brain scans into "wiring diagrams" ...
more
Foot fossils of human relative shows evolutionary 'messiness' of bipeds
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 09, 2015 -
A new study on Homo naledi, the extinct human relative whose remains were discovered in a South African cave and introduced to the world last month, suggests that although its feet were the most human-like part of its body, H. naledi didn't use them to walk in the same way we do.
Detailed analysis of 107 foot bones indicates that H. naledi was well adapted for standing and walking on two f ...
more
Research reveals new clues about how humans become tool users
Athens GA (SPX) Oct 12, 2015 -
New research from the University of Georgia department of psychology gives researchers a unique glimpse at how humans develop an ability to use tools in childhood while nonhuman primates--such as capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees--remain only occasional tool users.
Dorothy Fragaszy, a psychology professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Primate Behavior Labo ...
more
The hand and foot of Homo naledi
Johannesburg, South Africa (SPX) Oct 09, 2015 -
The second set of papers related to the remarkable discovery of Homo naledi, a new species of human relative, have been published in scientific journal, Nature Communications.
The two papers, titled: The foot of Homo naledi and The hand of Homo naledi, describe the structure and function of the H. naledi hand and foot. Taken together, the findings indicate H. naledi may have been uniquely ...
more
Breakthrough for electrode implants in the brain
Lund, Sweden (SPX) Oct 12, 2015 -
For nearly nine years, researchers at Lund University have been working on developing implantable electrodes that can capture signals from single neurons in the brain over a long period of time - without causing brain tissue damage. They are now one big step closer to reaching this goal, and the results are published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
This technology woul ...
more
Researchers build a digital piece of brain
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 12, 2015 -
If you want to learn how something works, one strategy is to take it apart and put it back together again. For 10 years, a global initiative called the Blue Brain Project--hosted at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)--has been attempting to do this digitally with a section of juvenile rat brain. The project presents a first draft of this reconstruction, which contains over 31,00 ...
more
