Merlin often communicates with Alali by pressing buttons she has designed and set up in their home in Sacramento. He will make simple requests with the buttons - like asking for a vegetable or an ice cube - but he also presses buttons labeled with emotions and asks for attention.
These caterpillars use a surprisingly complex rhythm like a secret knock to convince the ants to come fetch them. That's according to research published on February 25 in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, which found that caterpillars can keep a beat called double meter that has so far been identified only in a couple of primates.
As a specialist in pet behavior, especially dogs and cats, I often get the question of how people can tell if an animal is happy if it has no tail to wag. My answer is that the tail serves a communicative purpose in all animals, but not only that. Many also use it to keep their balance. That is to say, it's related to the biomechanics of their bodies and it helps them move around.
As our world becomes increasingly clogged with human noise, we must listen to what animals are saying to us. Even the smallest creature, you'll find when you take time to listen, is a somebody with something to say. Key questions include: What are animals saying, how much are we missing, and how can we be better listeners? Nonhuman animals of all varieties must live and thrive in an increasingly human-dominated world.
MICHIO KAKU: What computers need is data. Data by which we can draw conclusions. And when we talk about intelligence in outer space, we have to be open to the idea that their intelligence may be quite different, quite different from our intelligence. And therefore, the question is how do we tell? how do we tell where real intelligence is, given the fact that there could be more than one type of intelligence?
