NewScientist.com news service
Nora Schultz

Chimps happily help out unrelated chimps and unfamiliar humans, even if it means exerting themselves for no reward, a new study shows.

True altruism – unselfish acts for another's benefit – was until recently considered uniquely human. Usually when animals cooperate, they either help relatives – thereby increasing chances of passing shared genes to the next generation – or they count on having favours returned in the future.

Now Felix Warneken and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have found that 12 out of 18 semi-wild chimpanzees went out of their way to help an unfamiliar human who was struggling to reach a stick. Watch a video of a chimp helping retrieve the stick (MPG format).

The primates did this even when they were inconvenienced – such as when they first had to climb into a 2.5-metre-high ropeway – and for no reward. Equivalent experiments with human toddlers gave similar results (video, MPG format).

Labels: ecology

"A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level – turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas.

All that is needed, claims Global Resource Corporation (GRC), is a finely tuned microwave and – hey presto! – a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers).

Key to GRC’s process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.

GRC's machine is called the Hawk-10. Its smaller incarnations look just like an industrial microwave with bits of machinery attached to it. Larger versions resemble a concrete mixer."

Labels: ecology, environmental concerns