Abstract
Chimpanzees act cooperatively in the wild, but whether they afford benefits to others, and whether their tendency to act prosocially varies across communities, is unclear. Here, we show that chimpanzees from neighboring communities provide valuable resources to group members at personal cost, and that the magnitude of their prosocial behavior is group specific. Provided with a resource-donation experiment allowing free (partner) choice, we observed an increase in prosocial acts across the study period in most of the chimpanzees. When group members could profit (test condition), chimpanzees provided resources more frequently and for longer durations than when their acts produced inaccessible resources (control condition). Strikingly, chimpanzees’ prosocial behavior was group specific, with more socially tolerant groups acting more prosocially. We conclude that chimpanzees may purposely behave prosocially toward group members, and that the notion of group-specific sociality
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Advances in research on most general type of stem cells
Mouse embryo following injection of truly totipotent morula cells labeled in magenta. Morula cells are found shortly after an egg is fertilized. Credit: Eszter Posfai.
Stem cell research is the prerequisite for regenerative medicine, which with the help of the body’s cells recreates and heals important organs. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet, SickKids in Canada and KU Leuven in Belgium have found a method for defining the most general type of stem cells, that can develop into all cell types in the body. The study of totipotent stem cells in mice has been published in Nature Cell Biology.
Westerly Winds Could Intensify, Migrate Poleward with Climate Change
Written by AZoCleantechDec 10 2020
The most high-resolution past record of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds has now been developed by polar climate scientists.
The coast of sub-Antarctic Marion Island. Sea spray is washed over the land and into nearby lakes. Image Credit: Dominic Hodgson.
The study findings were published on December 9th, 2020, in the
Communications Earth and Environment journal and explain how the winds could probably strengthen and migrate poleward with the warming climate. The study offers data that will enhance the precision of models that predict the future.
The westerly winds (called the furious fifties, roaring forties and screaming sixties with respect to their latitude) are specifically strong since there is a lack of continental landmasses in the Southern Ocean to reduce their speed.