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Do Animals Laugh?

Critter News

Researchers tickled babies and six different kinds of apes, quantified their giggles, and found that the patterns fit a classic evolutionary tree. Those patterns hint at the ancient origins of human hilarity and suggest that other social species - including apes, dogs and rats - really, truly laugh as well.

Apes 100
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Potpourri of Amazing Bird Science

10,000 Birds

“This is just massive, massive, unprecedented,” said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. “We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths.

Science 151
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From Today's New York Times

Animal Ethics

The Unalienable Rights of Chimps ,” by Adam Cohen (Editorial Observer, July 14): The Spanish Parliament’s decision to grant rights to apes is indeed groundbreaking, and will foster philosophical discussion about animal protection for some time. Suffering is far from a uniquely human experience.