Monkeys proficient at mental math

Monkeys proficient at mental math
A college education doesn’t give you much of an edge over a monkey when it comes to doing some basic arithmetic, according to a study that underscores the surprising mental agility of our simian relatives. In a rapid fire test of mental addition, monkeys performed almost as well as college students, showing they’re no slouches when it comes to number crunching. The macaques got their sums right 76 per cent of the time, while the students got the correct answer 94 per cent of the time in a series of increasingly challenging maths tests. “We know that animals can recognise quantities, but there is less evidence for their ability to carry out explicit mathematical tasks, such as addition,” said Jessica Cantlon, a researcher at Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in Durham, North Carolina. “Our study shows that they can.” The study in the Public Library of Science Biology released this week comes just a couple of weeks after Japanese researchers revealed that young chimps outperformed college students in tests of short-term memory. The young chimps surprised the Japanese investigators by being able to retrace patterns of numbers flashed up on a computer screen faster than their human rivals.

Time for solar sands now?
One green idea may be baking in the oven at the European Parliament. It is to harness the intense desert sun, spending 400 billion euros to build thousands of generators in Africa and the Middle East. A third of the energy would go to Europe via undersea cables, the rest would go to host countries like Jordan or Algeria, two nations that have shown interest. The problem, say critics, is that the steep cost of building facilities and producing solar power put the project outside the realm of financial possibility. (Newsweek)

Some alcohol can help beat a cold
When it comes to quick remedies for colds, many people insist that a glass of brandy or whiskey with hot water is just what the doctor ordered. But so far no study has shown that alcohol has the ability to kill germs in the bloodstream or stop a cold in its tracks. Nonetheless, two large studies have found that although moderate drinking will not cure colds, it can help keep them at bay. One, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon in 1993, looked at 391 adults and found that resistance to colds increased with moderate drinking, except in smokers. Then, in 2002, researchers in Spain followed 4,300 healthy adults, examining their habits and susceptibility to colds. The study, in The American Journal of Epidemiology, found no relationship between the incidence of colds and consumption of beer, spirits, Vitamin C or zinc. But drinking eight to 14 glasses of wine per week, particularly red wine, was linked to as much as a 60 percent reduction in the risk of developing a cold. (NYT)