So sad.

Quoted: The lush sanctuary - home to some of the world's last mountain gorillas - was thrust onto the front lines of Congo's latest war in September. Since then, the fragile habitat in the Central African highlands has been overrun by rebels and soldiers, transformed into an off-limits war zone.

click to play

Quoted: Perhaps if they gave out beer instead of bananas as a reward for completing the task, the college students would have done better.

Pretty amazing. Make sure you check out the videos. Here's one of them:
http://download.current-biology.com/supplementarydata/curbio/17/23/r1004/DC1/mmc7.mpg

Quoted: Clearly, the chimps have the number thing down. So the researchers added an element of spatial memory, as you can see in this movie. After the first digit is touched by the test subject, the remaining numbers are obscured. As that video makes clear, this didn't slow down the chimp significantly. As a final test (shown here), the chimp is only afforded a brief glimpse of the numbers; his success rate didn't budge significantly. In contrast, humans (specifically college students) had a hard time with this test, barely outperforming the mother and losing badly to the young chimp.

About one minute in, you see Koko the gorilla use a mirror to wipe some glitter off her nose.

Quoted: It used to be thought that only humans could recognize themselves in mirrors, and display self-awareness. Thanks to studies like Project Koko, we now know that all great apes have this ability.

Not cute ;)

Quoted: They're an odd couple in every sense but a monkey and a pigeon have become inseparable at an animal sanctuary in China.

redotted from anjali.

Quoted: A 34-year-old female Asian elephant named Happy showed researchers that pachyderms can recognize themselves in a mirror — a highly complex behavior previously known in ...

Cool...

Quoted: To the best of my recollection, I’ve never been lost in the woods (or elsewhere away from civilization)—or at least not sufficiently lost that I didn’t have a general sense of which direction I needed to go. But if I were, I’d have many options for getting my bearings. I recall learning, as a kid, that moss always grows on the north side of a tree, and then learning later on that under the right conditions, moss can grow on any side of a tree. When there’s no moss, or when the moss steers you wrong, you can use any of numerous other tricks to find north.

Cool!

Quoted: Our editors have created a list about the top 10 hybrid animals. Hybrid animals are cross-breds between animals of similar genetics. They mostly exist in ...