I’ve been waiting a long time to see a hagfish in person. Last year I took a class miles out to sea, hauled up traps from 300 feet, and came up with nothing but mud. Today, however, we discovered not just one hagfish–but fifty. Buckets full of squirming jawless beasts that seemed to slither straight out of the Cambrian Period. Their slime is more like a jelly made of glass–a marvelous thing. I am here to declare that a day with fifty hagfish is a good day.

(For more, read “Secrets of the Slime Hag” (pdf)” in Scientific American by Frederic Martini)

[Image courtesy of Charlotte Zimmer, age 9]

Stop patting yourself on the back. You’re not so special. Orangutans, a new study suggests, also use complex gestures or pantomimes to communicate.

Looking through twenty years worth of orangutan observations, researchers believe they have found 18 examples of pantomimes. The study, which appeared today in Biology Letters, supports the claim that we’re not unique when it comes to abstract communication and lends credence to other observations of great ape gesturing, according to lead researcher Anne Russon.

[Orangutans and chimpanzees were already known] to throw an object when angry, for example. But that is a far cry from displaying actions that are intentionally symbolic and referential–the behaviour known as pantomiming. “Pantomime is considered uniquely human,” says Anne Russon from York University in Toronto, Canada. “It is based on imitation, recreating behaviours you have seen somewhere else, which can be considered complex and beyond the grasp of most non-human species.” [New Scientist]

Of the eighteen observed orangutan pantomimes, four took place between orangutans and 14 between a human and an orangutan. If you ever find yourself in the Indonesian jungles, here are some examples of messages that you might expect:

Lies

Orangutans can lie, it appears, pretending to engage in one activity while plotting another.

In some recordings, orangutans used gestures to distract or mislead others. One animal indicated to researchers that it wanted a haircut, as a ruse to divert their attention while it stole something, according to the study. [The Gaurdian]

Pity

Along that line, orangutans sometimes appeared to feign helplessness, as seen in this video in which a skilled coconut-opening orangutan pretends to be unable so that a human will do it for her.

The researchers jokingly call this sort of behavior “poor me,” referring to how the crafty apes feign weakness to get others to help. When Siti “failed,” she handed the coconut to a human staff member, along with the stick. She then pretended to use the stick as a machete, reenacting how she’d seen this person opening coconuts with machetes. He got the picture and opened the coconut with a machete while Siti impatiently waited with arms folded. [Discovery News]

Gratitude

Researchers believe that that the orangutans can also pantomime stories to reminisce. They cite a case of an orangutan with a foot injury named Kikan. A week after a conservationist pulled a small stone from the animal’s foot and used latex from a fig leaf to seal the wound, Kikan hugged the conservationist and re-enacted the foot first-aid. Says Russon:

“She’s not asking for anything, which is the most common aim observed of great ape communication, but appears simply to be sharing a memory with the person who helped her when she hurt her foot. It shows her understanding of how events had unfolded in a particular situation, which was very complex.” [BBC]

Good Hygiene

The orangutans observed in this exploratory study had once been in captivity but were then released into the forest. One orangutan seemed to remember face-scrubbings at a rehabilitation facility on Borneo.

[Russon says] she did know what was going on when a young male called Cecep plopped down in front of her and handed her a leaf. “I played dumb,” she remembers. “He waited a respectable few seconds, then–all the while looking me in the eye–he took back the leaf, rubbed it on his own forehead….” Again he handed it to her. “Then I did as I was told,” she says, and wiped away the dirt. [Science News]

Related content:
80beats: An Active Orangutan Burns Fewer Calories Than a Lazy Human
80beats: Study: Orangutans Play Leaf Instruments to Fool Predators
80beats: Syncopated Rhythm Makes Orangutans Masterful Swingers
80beats: Happy News: New Population of Endangered Orangutans Found in Borneo
80beats: Orangutans Are Threatened With Extinction as Habitat Shrinks

Image: Wikimedia / Malene Thyssen

Electrical outlets in O’Hare are like gasoline in The Road Warrior.

(Outfits aren’t as good, though.)

When a Tennessee man hacked Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and wrote of his exploits on the forum 4chan, federal investigators asked the site’s founder Christopher “Moot” Poole for server logs. Court testimony from April and published yesterday shows that federal prosecutors had other pressing questions for Poole: for example, the meaning of “peeps” and “rickroll.”

Assistant to the U.S. Attorney Mark Krotoski questions Poole:

Q. Certain terms, have a meaning unique to 4chan?
A. Yes.

Q. Like “OP,” what is “OP”?
A. OP means original poster.

Q. Are you familiar these terms, having been the founder and administrator of the 4chan site?
A. Yes.

Q. What would “lurker” mean?
A. Somebody who browses but does not post, does not contribute.

Q. What do the words “caps” mean?
A. Screenshots.

Q. And is there any significance to “new fags”?
A. That is the term used to describe new users to the site.

Q. What about “b tard”?
A. It’s a term that users of the /b/- Random board use for themselves.

Q. What about “troll”?
A. Troublemaker.

Q. “404″?
A. 404 is the status code for not found. It means essentially gone or not found.

Q. Not found on where, the 4chan site?
A. 404 is the http status code for not found, a page not found by the Web server.

Q. In what about “peeps”?
A. People.

Q. “Rickroll”?
A. Rickroll is a mean [sic] or Internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users — it basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up.

Bonus humor points for the fact that the court reporter had apparently never heard the word “meme” before. The story went viral yesterday; we found it on Gawker’s Valleywag and the complete testimony on The Smoking Gun. Apologies to those hoping to find a reference to LOLcats: relevancy?

Check out DISCOVER on Facebook.

Related content:
Bad Astronomy: Sucked into a black LOL
Discoblog: Your Plants Have More Twitter Followers Than You—Literally
Discoblog: ZOMG! Get These iPhone Apps Right Meow!
Discoblog: Should the Internet Win the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize?

Image: flickr /Andrew Dupont

Was Lucy a tool user and a meat eater?

Quite possibly, argues a new study in Nature. Archaeologist Shannon McPherron turned up animal bones at an Ethiopian site that he says show markings of stone tool cutting dating back nearly 3.4 million years. That would be a big jump in the record: Right now the oldest known evidence of tool use among our ancestral species dates back about 2.6 million years.

McPherron’s date falls in the time of Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which the famous Lucy find belongs. But thus far he’s found only the markings on bones—not the tools themselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, at least one scientist behind the 2.6 million-year-old find says the new study is not convincing evidence that tool use dates back all the way to 3.4 million years ago.

For plenty more about the find—and the differing opinions—check out DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong’s post.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Human Ancestors Carved Meat with Stone Tools Almost a Million Years Earlier Than Expected
80beats: Lucy’s New Relative, “Big Man,” May Push Back the Origin of Walking
DISCOVER: How Loyal Was Lucy?

Image: Dikika Research Project

So I’ve recently moved to Washington, D.C., and into a newish building. And I’ve been getting a utility bill with a rather large number being charged (on the order of $ 75 per month) for something called “HVAC,” or, heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

My inquiries into what this charge is for, and whether I can do anything to avoid it, speak volumes about the inefficiencies of our current energy system.

Turns out HVAC is calculated in the following way. There’s a total HVAC value for the building, and then an algorithm is used to apportion a supposedly fair fraction of the bill to each resident. The algorithm centrally takes into account 1) square footage of your apartment unit; 2) number of occupants. All of this is carried out by a sub-metering company, which then sends you the bill.

Let me acknowledge at the outset that I have no idea why things are set up this way–whether it is the choice of my building, or of some utility, or some other possibility. So I’m not laying blame. But I am interpreting the consequences of the arrangement–because as far as I can tell, the consequences are that there is absolutely no incentive for anybody in the building to save energy.

In fact, the incentive is probably the opposite–to blast cold air all the time. After all, you’re not really paying for it–your neighbors are.

In my case, I have a unit that gets no direct sunlight, so that even in this hot DC summer, the temperature remains about 75 degrees on average. Mostly, that’s fine with me, and I rarely use A/C. Furthermore, I travel a lot, and I turn everything off before I leave. So there will be a week or more at a time when there is no air conditioning at all being used in the apartment.

Up until now, then, I’ve been acting as a conscientious energy saver–a perfect little tree hugger. Up until now, I knew nothing about this HVAC business, or that my greenish behavior would have little to no effect on a key component of my energy bill.

But now that I do know, the question becomes, why be green? Heck, I’m tempted to start cranking the A/C. Everybody else in the building is, apparently. I’m no economist, but doesn’t this sound a bit like the tragedy of the commons scenario?

In fairness, I probably get a little bit of cooling from the A/C use of the other apartments, even if my A/C remains turned off. That’s probably worth taking into account. And maybe I’ll want more HVAC in the winter than I do in the summer, due to my lack of sunlight (though I doubt it).

Still, I don’t think these considerations outweigh the fundamental inefficiency and perverse incentives of this situation.

Now multiply my experience by the number of people living in buildings employing a similar sub-metering scenario (I have no idea how many there are, but somebody out there does). My guess is that you will end up with a very large inefficiency and dysfunctionality in our energy economy–a lot of waste, and a lot of discouragement of energy conserving behavior.

Smart metering, anyone?

Every time we slice into a steak or cut into some chicken, we’re taking part in a technological heritage that stretches back at least 3.4 million years. Back then, the only cutting implements around were sharp pieces of stone and there were no true humans around to wield them. But there were still butchers– one of our ancestral species, Australopithecus afarensis, was already using stone tools to flay meat off bones, leaving small nicks with every cut. Such marked bones have been found and they push back the earliest estimates of tool use among human ancestors by 800,000 years.

In January 2009, a team led by Shannon McPherron from the Max Planck Institute found bones which had clearly been worked over with stone tools. The bones, uncovered in Dikika, Ethiopia, include the rib of a cow-sized animal and the thighbone of a goat-sized one. Both bore cuts and scratches inflicted by sharp objects and dents produced by crushing hammers.

By peering at the marks under powerful microscopes and analysing their chemical composition, McPherron confirmed that they were made by stone rather than teeth, and they were created before the bones fossilised. These were not accidental scratches, but the remnants of strikes used to carve off the meat and break into the marrow.

Based on the surrounding rock layers, which have been very accurately dated, McPherron calculated that the bones are at least 3.39 million years old. These relics push back both the history of butchery and the use of stone tools by human ancestors, by almost a million years. Until now, the oldest evidence for the manufacture of stone tools comes from finds in Gona, Ethiopia that are just 2.6 million years old, while the oldest cut-marked bones were found in nearby Bouri and dated to around 2.5 million years ago.

The Dikika site has been thoroughly studied by a team led by Zeresenay Alemseged (photo below), who also had a hand in the latest discovery. In fact, the new bones were found just 200 metres away from Alemseged’s most famous find – the bones of a three-year-old Australopithecus afarensis girl, known as Selam. No other hominin (a term for members of the human lineage) lived in the same area. This provides strong evidence that A.afarensis , such as the famous Lucy, used stone tools and ate meat. Selam may even have watched or helped as her family members carved up the carcass of a large animal.

In a way, this isn’t surprising. Recent discoveries have done much to strip A.afarensis of its early reputation as a primitive hominin and even other primates like chimpanzees use stone tools. McPherron says, “A. afarensis had a similar sized brain and perhaps somewhat better hands for the job, at some level it is not surprising that A. afarensis should use stone tools. However, we can’t assume that simply because chimps use stone tools and we use tools that the behaviour is as old as our common ancestor.”

Nonetheless, both tool use and meat-eating are critically important events in human evolution. “Some have argued that meat consumption is what set us down the path towards the large brained, behaviorally complex species that we are today,” says McPherron. “It has been said that meat made us human. It provides a more nutrient rich diet that made possible a larger brain.”

The use of tools also gave our ancestors access to rich sources of meat, namely the carcasses of large, dead animals. Most other primates would turn their noses up at such foods but it’s clear that A.afarensis did not. Indeed, the costs of eating such carcasses, such as competition with predators, may have driven the use of more sophisticated tools and close teamwork.

For now, McPherron hasn’t actually found any of the actual cutting tools or, in fact, any sharp-edged stones nearby. That’s to be expected – the area where the bones were found used to be part of the floodplain of a river and probably didn’t contain any stones larger than fine gravel. The nearest suitable materials were around 6 kilometres away. “If the stone tool had been made elsewhere and carried to this spot, as it almost certainly was, the odds of us finding it would be small even if they dropped it there,” says McPherron.

There is, of course, another explanation: McPherron’s team could be wrong. Sileshi Senaw, who discovered the Gona tools, certainly thinks so and says that the data just aren’t strong enough to support their conclusions. The Dikika researchers are making a huge claim based on very meager data,” he says. “Researchers who study bone surface modifications from archeological sites have shown that fresh bones trampled by animals can create marks that mimic stone tool cut marks… I am not convinced of the new discovery.”

But McPherron stands by his interpretation and has other explanations: the butchers might just have picked up naturally sharp rocks from their surroundings; they could have made them so infrequently that they’ll be hard to find; or, simply, no one has looked hard enough. “I favor a combination of the last two,” he says.

Alison Brooks from George Washington University agrees. She thinks the sudden appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record, some 2.6 million years ago, doesn’t represent the point where early humans started using them, but the point where they started making them at concentrated sites where they’re more likely to be found. There was a long time window before that when stone tools were used in a more scattered way, a window that McPherron’s team have been lucky enough to look through.

McPherron plans to return to Dikika in January 2011 for a more intensive search. “There’s a location nearby where raw materials for stone tool production may have been available 3.4 [million years ago], and I hope to target this area to see if we can find evidence of stone tool manufacture.”

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09248

Images by the Dikika Research Project

More on archaeology:

• Norfolk – the home of the earliest known humans in Britain
• An 60,000-year old artistic movement recorded in ostrich egg shells
• Prehistoric carving is oldest known figurative art
• Tree rings reveal two droughts that sealed the fate of Angkor
• 35,000-year-old German flutes display excellent kraftwerk

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here