Do chimps have a language?
And if so... do they subscribe to newsletters?
Greetings my good human. I really hope you’re doing well and keeping calm and healthy. Welcome to another week-another newsletter where we discuss all things science and academia. I appreciate you being here. If you want to get these newsletters right in your inbox you can subscribe using the cute button below! It’s free!
This week we have an amalgam (now that’s a word) of news. Our focus will be on chimpanzees and their means of communication. Fans of this newsletter will know that I have a fascination with animals in general and I’m always excited to find out more about their means of social structure and how similar they are to us. Plus some news about better cooling for our electronics, and the activity of our brain when we receive depression treatment. Let’s ask away then…
Do chimpanzees have a language?
We all know about body language and the fact that even we use it on a daily basis to show trust, fear, anger, and more. However, when it comes to more complex communication, do chimpanzees have their own language, with phrases, it’s grammatical rules, and structure?
A Ph.D. student from the Max Planck Institute actually had a similar question after spending a long time in 2019 and 2020 recording 46 chimps at the Taï National Park. Tatiana Bortolato realized that chimps make some distinct sounds. They howl, squeak, bark, scream, grunt, and bark. Sometimes they do all of those things in a row. So after capturing more than 900 hours of recorded sounds it was time to sit down and figure out of those sounds carried more information.
In order to find out if those sounds could be intentional phrases or parts of phrases, we need to figure out if the sequences like “bark, squeak, bark, grunt, grunt” appear more often than they would by pure chance. By analyzing 900 hours of recordings (I know I mentioned this before but 900 hours is a lot! and I’m amazed), scientists figured out that there are some combinations like “hoot-pant-grunt" that appear very often as units or as parts of bigger phrases. All in all,
they figured out that chimps have 400 different calls in their vocabulary.
Wow. What’s next?
While we don’t have the exact meanings of these 400 phrases (yet) it is a great achievement to find out about the existence of a language between a species in our animal kingdom. It is fascinating to think that one of the most common dreams we have is to communicate with species from outer space, while at the same time there are species within our own planet that we haven’t been able to figure out the language yet.
The study about the language of chimps hasn’t considered the different tonal changes between the same sound as having a different meaning which could increase the vocabulary range by a lot. The next step for the scientists is to figure out if there are other attributes that we could consider as part of a language. Are there clauses for example? As you can understand deciphering the language of a different species is a time-consuming job.
In other news… let’s cool things down!
Electronics are cool, aren’t they? (Hey it’s Geek Pride Day today allow me to express my fascination). My statistics show that most of you readers will remember the old tower computers we had, with the huge fans that were making that very cute BRRRRRRRRR noise all the time, especially after you’ve been playing video games for a full weekend.
Electronics in a computer (or in anything really), get hot. REALLY hot. You could fry an egg if you wanted to. I wouldn’t advise it, especially if you would like to use your computer for long. That heat even though could be used to prepare breakfast, is not something we aim for. That’s why we have heat sinks and thermal management is a huge issue when designing electronics. However, conventional methods of cooling have some drawbacks. They are expensive and hard to scale. They require direct contact with the electronic device and lastly they are not addressing the problem at its source.
Well, a Ph.D. student from UC Berkeley recently published a paper addressing all of those problems. His solution involves copper coatings (which is cheap) around the electronics that will address the problem at its source, it won’t require a bulky heat sink or an interface material. Their solution not only showed a heat management solution that is more elegant, but it’s also more efficient since it increases the power per unit volume of the electronics by more than 7 times!!
There are more tests to be done in terms of the durability of the solution in order for it to become commercially available but it is a big step towards faster and more efficient electronics.
Let’s move now to the brain…
The last story for this week comes from the University of British Columbia and a study that looked into the brain when it receives a depression treatment called “repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” or rTMS.
Studies have shown that around 40% of people do not respond to depression medication and this is when rTMS is considered as a treatment. During the treatment, a device sends a magnetic pulse to stimulate the nerve cells of the brain in the area that regulates mood. While this technique has been used for some time and has been shown to work, the question as to why this technique works was not well understood.
The solution was “simple”. Scientists delivered rTMS treatments to patients while the patients were inside an MRI scanner that allowed them to scan the brain for activity. What they saw was fascinating since the magnetic stimulation stimulated other regions of the brain as well that manage emotional responses to memory and motor control. By now understanding which areas of the brain are activated during a successful rTMS treatment, scientists can find a pattern and see how they can help more patients that suffer from depression.
Any more news this week?
If your thurst is not quenched with the above news from science and academia here are some more headlines
Diet plays key role in ADHD symptoms in children, by Ohio State News
UFC mixed martial arts fighting events appear to reduce involvement in violent crime, by PsyPost
Scientists discover 'ghost' fossils beneath a microscope, by CNN
That’s all for this week! I hope that the rest of the week will be calm and rewarding. Did you like this newsletter? if you did you can subscribe to it at the top of the page and why not share it around using this sexy little button here