matsuzawa

At Kyoto University in Japan, students and chimps saw an array of five of the numerals 1 through 9 flash onto a computer screen for just 650 milliseconds. When the numerals simultaneously turned into white squares, the subjects had to touch the squares in numerical order. The students managed to choose the squares in the correct order around 80 percent of the time, as did Ayumu, a young chimp, says Kyoto's Tetsuro Matsuzawa.

The researchers then shortened the viewing time to 430 ms and finally to just 210 ms, which isn't even enough time for a person's eye to scan across a screen. For the briefest exposures, the students got the sequence right only 40 percent of the time, but Ayumu still managed nearly 80 percent accuracy. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

"The memory aspect is really surprising," says Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Matsuzawa suggests that Ayumu's prowess comes from something akin to photographic memory in humans. The power to retain extreme detail from a quick glimpse shows up occasionally in young children but fades with age. Youth seems to be an advantage for chimps too, Matsuzawa and Sana Inoue say in the Dec. 4 Current Biology.

The researchers worked with three pairs of mother-child chimps. Ayumu's mother, Ai, had starred in earlier research papers when she learned to associate sets of objects with the appropriate numerals.

Researchers trained all the chimps to tap numerals from 1 to 9 in order, then switched to tests in which numerals popped up briefly on the screen and then turned into white squares. Because the exposure times are so brief, the test challenges perception as well as memory, says comparative psychologist Herbert Roitblat of Ventura, Calif.

On average, the three young chimps outperformed their mothers, the researchers say. Even Ai, despite her skill in using numbers as symbols, proved less accurate than her son. Brannon says she'll be interested to see whether Ayumu loses his edge as he ages.

"The test says absolutely zero about chimpanzees and numerosity," comments Brannon, who studies number skills in non-human primates. She predicts that the test could have substituted other shapes for the numerals in the test. "It's really about memory," she says.

"It is a terrific animal-human comparison of the cognitive ability to remember the locations of an ordered sequence," says Anthony A. Wright of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

"Chimpanzees may have a perceptual advantage that is slowed down in humans, whose knowledge of counting may interfere," says Sally Boysen of the Ohio State University in Columbus.

However, Matsuzawa's results don't mean that people will always lose to chimps, Brannon says. Ayumu might be an exceptional chimp, and some exceptional people, including children, might be able to keep up with him.

Overall, the scores for people and chimps greatly overlapped. To Brannon, this convergence suggests a basic likeness in the two species' memory mechanisms. "I would argue that this is showing a major qualitative similarity rather than a major difference," she says. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

As to why researchers pit humans against other species, Roitblat says comparisons with close and distant relatives offer a way to infer the evolutionary path of human capacities. "Are we intelligent because we have language or do we have language because we are intelligent?" Roitblat asks.

kiribati

Anote Tong has already accepted that his home could become the next Atlantis.

Tong is the president of the Republic of Kiribati, a chain of tiny Pacific islands near the equator, and he is alarmed about global warming for good reason. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire The highest point in Kiribati is only two meters above sea level; if the gravest scientific predictions are correct, Tong says, Kiribati will be underwater by the turn of the next century. Last week he spoke at a World Environment Day event in New Zealand, in an attempt to get the world’s attention. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Kiribati is at the heart of the mess of uncertainty about how to deal with global warming. Some global warming doubters have said that small drops in sea level measured in parts of the Pacific show that sea levels aren’t rising precipitously, and people like Tong are simply playing Chicken Little. Most scientists, on the other hand, agree that the seas are rising as glaciers melt.

But ocean levels are more complex than just glaciers melting or not, so truly reliable climate data comes from decades of steady measurements. It’s hard to tell Tong to sit and wait, however, when many climate models project that it might already be too late to save Kiribati from the rising ocean. Even if we did everything we could to curb global warming starting today, says Martin Parry of the International Panel on Climate Change, there could be a century of “inertia” in rising sea levels—the greenhouse gases we have already emitted will stay in the environment and continue to warm the earth into the future.

If that happens, 100,000 displaced Kiribati residents might need someplace else to go.

prepared

MAY 17TH.—Sunshine and showers.

The battle yesterday decided nothing, that I am aware of. We captured 1000 prisoners, stormed some of their intrenchments; losing altogether probably as many as the enemy. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de But we drove them back to Bermuda Hundred, behind their fortifications, and near their ships.

Gen. Johnston was attacked at Dalton by 80,000 men last week; accounts, some five days old, say he repulsed the assaults of the enemy.

The Departmental Battalion is out yet; the city being still in danger. The government is almost suspended in its functions. The Secretary of the Treasury cannot get money from Columbia, S. C., whither he foolishly sent the girls that sign the notes.

Some of the idle military officers, always found about the departments, look grave, and do not hesitate to express some apprehension of the success of Grant in forcing Lee back, and spreading over all Northern and Northwestern Virginia. The Secretary of War is much secluded, and I see by a correspondence between him and the Secretary of the Treasury, relating to the million and three-quarters in coin, belonging to the New Orleans banks, that the Secretary of the Treasury can make no “valid objection to the proposition of the Secretary of War.” I do not understand what disposition they propose to make of it. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

A list is being prepared at the War Department (by Mr. Assistant Secretary Campbell) for Congress to pass, authorizing the seizure of all the railroads in the Confederacy. Also one establishing and reorganizing the Bureau of Conscription.

If Butler remains between Richmond and Petersburg, and is reinforced, and Grant is strong enough (two to Lee’s one) to push on toward Richmond, our perils and trials will be greater than ever.

Vice-President Stephens has not yet arrived. I do not understand that he is ill.