Group items tagged

The difference between pointing by the Great Ape Trust bonobos - the only ones in the world with receptive competence for spoken English - and other captive apes that make hand gestures is explained by the culture in which they were reared, according to the paper's authors: Janni Pedersen, an Iowa State University Ph.D. candidate conducting research for her dissertation at Great Ape Trust; Pär Segerdahl, a scientist from Sweden who has published several philosophical inquires into language; and William M. Fields, an ethnographer investigating language, culture and tools in non-human primates. Fields also is Great Ape Trust's director of scientific research. Because Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota were raised in a culture where pointing has a purpose - The Trust's hallmark Pan/Homo environment, where infant bonobos are reared with both bonobo (Pan paniscus) and human (Homo sapiens) influences - their pointing is as scientifically meaningful as their understanding of spoken English, Fields said. The pointing study supports and builds on previous research on the effect of rearing culture on cognitive capabilities, including the 40-year research corpus of Dr. Duane Rumbaugh, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Fields, which is the foundation of the scientific inquiry at Great Ape Trust. Those studies included the breakthrough finding that Kanzi and other bonobos with receptive competence for spoken English acquired language as human children do - by being exposed to it since infancy. The bonobos adopted finger-pointing behavior for the same reasons, because they were reared in a culture where pointing has meaning.

The researchers, led by professor of applied and engineering physics Harold Craighead, made a device just 200 nanometers thick and a few microns long with an oscillating cantilever hanging off one end. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a micron is one-millionth of a meter.) They identified exactly how to tune its sensitivity -- a breakthrough that could lead to advanced sensing technologies. The experiments detailed online Feb. 8 in Journal of Applied Physics show how these oscillators, which are nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), could one day be made into everyday devices by lining up millions of them and treating each cantilever with a certain molecule. "The big purpose is to be able to drive arrays of these things all in direct synchrony," said first author Rob Ilic, a research associate at the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility. "They can be functionalized with different chemistries and biomolecules to detect various pathogens -- not just one thing."