November 23, 2009

Studio 360 : "Hominid" reenacts violence of chimpanzee colony

November 23, 2009/ peterdurand

SOURCE: www.topnews.in

Homo-Thespian: A new play, "Hominid," reenacts a violent incident that took place in a chimpanzee colony. Primate expert Frans de Waal and the play's actors describe what it took to stage a chimpanzee drama with a very human story.

Substituting for murderous, hairy apes is a chorus of bright and shiny affluent cultural elites in sparkling tennis whites.

The story, however, ends the same, with suicide, murder and the overthrown of a beloved leader!

April 12, 2007

Orangutans Play Video Games

April 12, 2007/ peterdurand

From Forbes.com via Associated Press:

Four-year-old Bernas isn't the computer wizard his mom is, but he's learning. Just the other day he used his lips and feet to play a game on the touch-screen monitor as his mom, Madu, swung from vines and climbed trees. The two Sumatran orangutans at Zoo Atlanta are playing computer games while researchers study the cognitive skills of the orange and brown primates.

The best part? Zoo visitors get to watch their every move.

The orangutans use a touch screen built into a tree-like structure that blend in with their zoo habitat. Visitors watch from a video monitor in front of the exhibit.

The computer games, which volunteers from IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) spent nearly 500 hours developing, test the animals' memory, reasoning and learning, spitting out sheets of data for researchers at the zoo and Kyle Frantz's team at Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, a partner in the project.