A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
The researchers filmed two social groups of chimpanzees living in two Swiss zoological gardens while the animals repeatedly viewed film clips. The films portrayed the actions of other chimps unknown to them. The control clip showed chimps doing neutral activities such as walking or cracking nuts. The experimental clips included aggressive scenes, such as an infant chimpanzee being killed by its own kind, a small colobus monkey being hunted and killed by chimps, and socially aggressive behavior between chimpanzee adults. The taped sessions were analyzed to find out how long the chimps in the experiment looked at the screen, whether they were aroused or affected by what they saw, and how they behaved while doing so.
The zoo animals looked up to four times longer at the infanticide scenes than at any of the other films. The chimps did not merely respond to the infant screams they heard, they paid preferential attention to these scenes as a whole. This shows that chimpanzees can distinguish severe aggression against infants from other forms of aggression and harmful behavior. It also indicates that such incidents do not match the social expectations of tolerance normally granted toward infants. This is a form of so-called proto social norms at work, where individuals react as bystanders to a violation of a certain expectation of how others should behave.
much longer, the research team found only limited evidence that what they saw caused the viewing chimps to be more aroused or to react to them. "The results suggest that chimpanzees detect norm violations both within their group as well as in a group of unfamiliar individuals, but that they will only respond emotionally to such norm violations within their own group," says Rudolf von Rohr.
The Swiss study adds to the growing body of evidence that identifies the building blocks of human morality in our closest living relatives. These precursors include consolation and policing behavior. Rudolf von Rohr believes that future research might provide important insights into the evolution of specific social norms in humans and why some of them are widely accepted and others are more difficult to establish.
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