Latest Monkey Stories

CAMBRIDGE -- When trying to understand someone's intentions, non-human primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University.The findings appear in the Sept. 7 issue of the journal of Science. The work was led by Justin Wood, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, with David Glynn, a research assistant, and Marc...

Monkey viruses related to HIV may have swept across Africa more recently than previously thought, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.A new family tree for African green monkeys shows that an HIV-like virus, simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, first infected those monkeys after the lineage split into four species. The new research reveals the split happened about 3 million years ago.Previously, scientists thought SIV infected an ancestor of green monkeys...

WASHINGTON -- Language centers in the brains of rhesus macaques light up when the monkeys hear calls and screams from fellow monkeys, researchers said in a study that suggests language skills evolved early in primates.Researchers who scanned the brains of monkeys while playing them various sounds found the animals used the same areas of the brain when they heard monkey calls as humans do when listening to speech.Writing in this week's issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, the...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Long-tailed macaques used as performance monkeys in Indonesia are sometimes infected with viruses that could cross the species barrier and infect humans, investigators report. Performance monkeys may represent a threat to humans because of the way they are bought and sold and their close proximity to humans, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel and her associates explain. The animals are usually obtained from animal markets where they are kept under crowded and unsanitary...

NEW YORK -- Long-tailed macaques used as performance monkeys in Indonesia are sometimes infected with viruses that could cross the species barrier and infect humans, investigators report.Performance monkeys may represent a threat to humans because of the way they are bought and sold and their close proximity to humans, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel and her associates explain.The animals are usually obtained from animal markets where they are kept under crowded and unsanitary conditions that could...

Astrobiology Magazine -- Monkeys have a semantic perception of numbers that is like humans' and which is independent of language, Duke University cognitive neuroscientists have discovered. They said their findings demonstrate that the neural mechanism underlying numerical perception is evolutionarily primitive. Jessica Cantlon and Elizabeth Brannon described their findings with macaque monkeys in an article published online the week of Oct. 31, 2005, in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of...

When you jaywalk, your ability to keep track of that oncoming truck despite your constantly changing position can be a lifesaver. But scientists do not understand how such constant updating of depth and distance takes place, suspecting that the brain receives information not just from the eye but also from the motion-detecting vestibular system in the middle ear. In studies with monkeys reported in the October 6, 2005, issue of Neuron, Nuo Li and Dora Angelaki of Washington University School...

MADISON, Wis. -- A study at the University of Wisconsin led to an unusual number of deaths and illnesses of rhesus monkeys in 2001 and 2002, internal school records show. The UW memos were released Monday by the Primate Freedom Project, a group critical of animal research, which obtained them through an open records request. The records show one monkey died while an attendant went to lunch during an experiment, and others were given drugs that had not been approved by a review committee at...

Scientists have identified the first reported case in Asia of primate-to-human transmission of simian foamy virus (SFV), a retrovirus found in macaques and other primates that so far has not been shown to cause disease in humans. The transmission of the virus from a monkey to a human took place at a monkey temple in Bali, Indonesia, the researchers report in the July issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. Even though this particular virus jumping to humans may not prove dangerous,...

New Haven, Conn. - The basic economic theory that people work harder to avoid losing money than they do to make money is shared by monkeys, suggesting this trait has a long evolutionary history, according to a Yale University study under review by the Journal of Political Economy. This phenomenon, known as "loss aversion," refers to the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. "A large body of studies suggest that losses are more than twice as...