Rump Recognition: Chimps Remember Butts Same as Faces

Chimpanzees can recognize each other from behind.

While chimps remember faces as well, new research has found that the primates recognize the buttocks of their kin just as well as humans recall familiar faces. Not only that, but our hairy relatives also seem to utilize the same type of brain processing for their neighbor's butt that humans use to spot a familiar face.

The ability to recognize one another is important for social animals. For humans, the face offers important information beyond identity, such as attractiveness and health. For chimpanzees, their buttocks can serve the same purpose . For instance, chimps can determine if the rump they see belongs to a relative or to a female that is ovulating.

"Faces are enormously important for people, and all the features of our faces are optimally arranged to be seen and to communicate," study author Mariska Kret, a neuropsychologist at Leiden University, said in a statement. "In the course of evolution, our faces have acquired more contrast: red lips, the whites of our eyes, eyebrows and a smooth skin that makes everything more visible.”

Color also plays an important role for chimps. Kret explained that female primates have hairless faces and buttocks, making the skin features, such as color, more visible. Female chimpanzees' bottoms are red, deepening in color and growing in size when the female is ovulating. Primates' eyes are also able to easily distinguish red tints, the researchers said.

In the study, the researchers tested chimpanzees' recognition abilities by using the "face inversion effect" — a phenomenon in which the brain recognizes human faces faster than other objects, but not if those faces are inverted. However, when people see an object such as a house, they recognize it just as rapidly (or slowly) whether or not it is inverted. The exact cause of this effect is unknown.

Researchers showed both humans and chimpanzees stimuli such as the faces, buttocks — and, as a control, feet — of both humans and chimpanzees. For instance, participants were shown an image of a pair of buttocks,and then they were shown some other photos and were tasked with tapping the original image on a touch screen to indicate recognition.

For humans, the "face inversion effect" was proven to only apply to faces, with inverted face images delaying humans' recognition. Howver, the humans recognized the buttocks quickly, whether the photos were upright or inverted.

When the chimpanzees were presented with images of buttocks, they were much faster to click on the buttocks image when it was upright rather than inverted.

"This is a good indication that this category has priority over other categories of objects," Kret said.

The findings were published in a study online Nov. 30 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Historic Iraq Sites Reclaimed in Mosul Offensive

A military offensive to take back the city of Mosul, Iraq, from the Islamic State group (also called ISIS) has also resulted in the retaking of several historic sites that ISIS destroyed and looted.

The offensive is being carried out by the Iraq military and the Peshmerga, which is a Kurdish force supported by Iraqi Kurdistan (an autonomous region of the country). Air strikes by a coalition of countries are supporting these ground troops. U.S. Special Forces are also on the ground and assisting in the fighting. The forces have retaken outlying areas of Mosul, and ground troops are making their way toward the center of the city. [Photos: Restoring Life to Iraq's Ruined Artifacts]

As troops advance, they have retaken a number of historic sites, and reports are coming in about the sites' condition:

ISIS fighters heavily damaged and looted Khorsabad, an ancient Assyrian capital that was built by King Sargon II (reign ca. 721-705 B.C.), before a Peshmerga force retook the site.

"Many fragments" of sculptures and royal inscriptions have been found and transported to the directorate of antiquities of Akre for conservation, said Dlshad Marf Zamua, a Kurdish archaeologist who is completing a doctorate at Leiden University in the Netherlands. A Kurdish language news reportshared images of a few of the fragments.

Marf Zamua, working as a Kurdish-English translator during the battle for Mosul, said that when the war is over he plans to visit Khorsabad and the remains of other ancient Assyrian cities.

Mar Behnam

Forces have also recently retaken the site of Mar Behnam, a Christian monastery built about 1,500 years ago, the Assyrian International News Agency reported. ISIS destroyed much of the monastery. Graffiti spray-painted by ISIS covers the surviving buildings, while the artwork and inscriptions inside of those buildings had been destroyed, the news agency reported.

In the surviving buildings, "all crosses were removed, religious scripts scraped off the walls and all references to the Assyrian King Benham who built the monastery were removed," the agency reported. In the surviving buildings, "monks' bedrooms [were] turned into jail cells" by ISIS, who also burned Christian texts, the agency reported.

"It's awful. It's disgusting," said Amir Harrak, an expert in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) at the University of Toronto. One of the last people to visit Mar Behnam, Harrak left the site just two months before ISIS captured it in June 2014. In destroying historic sites, ISIS has insulted Muslims, Christians and all Iraqis, said Harrak, who is a native of Mosul (he left in 1977).

Harrak has taken about 700 photographs of inscriptions and artwork from many now-destroyed sites in Iraq. The photos are now part of a publicly available database, which Harrak said he hopes will allow future generations to learn about, study and appreciate the sites. Even so, Harrak said the inscriptions and artwork that ISIS destroyed are irreplaceable.

Nimrud

Ashurnasirpal II (reign 883-859 B.C.) used the ancient city of Nimrud as the capital of Assyria, and he constructed a massive palace there. ISIS destroyed or looted much of the site, using bulldozers and dynamite. [Photos: New Archaeological Discoveries in Northern Iraq]

This site was also recently retaken and photographs show that most of the ancient palace has been destroyed and many inscriptions and works of art have been smashed to pieces. However, not all is lost as those same photographs show that a number of inscriptions and even a few works of art have survived, if only in a damaged state.

Iraq archaeologists have arrived on site and security has been arranged to prevent further destruction and looting. A forthcoming Live Science story will reveal some of the surviving inscriptions.

Will Artificial Intelligence Be the Next Einstein

SAN FRANCISCO – Forget the Terminator. The next robot on the horizon may be wearing a lab coat.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already helping scientists form testable hypotheses that enable experts to run real experiments, and the technology may soon be poised to help businesses make decisions, one scientist says.

However, that doesn't mean the machines will be taking over from humans entirely. Instead, humans and machines have complementary skillsets, so AI could help researchers with the work they already do, Laura Haas, a computer scientist and director of the IBM Research Accelerated Discovery Lab in San Jose, California, said here Wednesday (Dec. 7) at the Future Technologies Conference.

"The machine will come to be a strong partner to humans," akin to the android Data on the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Haas said.

Big Data

Though many people fear a future where our robot overlords surpass humans in almost every capacity, in reality, machines have long outpaced mere mortals at many tasks, such as doing incredibly fast mathematical computations. But this dominance is nowhere clearer than in the realm of Big Data.

"Global scientific output doubles every nine years; 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone; 2.5 exabytes of data are created every day," Haas said. (An exabyte is equivalent to 1 billion gigabytes.)

In the competition between man and machine, computers are the undisputed winners at processing and assimilating all this information, Haas said.

Angel of death

After IBM's Watson trounced Ken Jennings in "Jeopardy!", Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, a molecular biologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, contacted Haas' group to see if similar technology could help him in his research.

Lichtarge was looking at a specific gene, called p53, which is dubbed the cell's "angel of death," Haas said. The gene helps direct the cell through its life cycle and kills aging or damaged cells. In about 50 percent of cancer cases, there is some problem with how p53 is functioning, Haas added. What's more, research had revealed that certain molecules, called kinases, played a key role in the functioning of p53.

But, there were more than 70,000 scientific papers written about this gene, and 5,000 new studies are cropping up each year. A lab assistant could never read all the literature to identify good kinase candidates, so Lichtarge asked the group to build a program that could read through the existing literature and then identify molecules that might act as kinases to p53.

The AI assistant scanned through hordes of medical abstracts from studies published before 2004, and identified nine different kinase molecules that were potentially affecting the activity of p53.

In the ensuing decade, other researchers had identified seven of those molecules as kinases. Two, however, were never mentioned in all of the literature.

"They went off and tried to do some experimentation in the lab," Haas said. "About a year later, we had proof both in vivo and in vitro experimentation that these two were kinases."

Of course, Watson isn't yet up to the level of a brilliant and trained research scientist. In this instance, AI was used to tackle a narrow, straightforward problem that was very well posed, and it also benefited from a wealth of scientific data, Haas said.

But the results were exciting nonetheless, she said.