Do male chimps have BFFs? It turns out the answer is yes. Primatologists knew that male chimps formed short-term friendships, and had always assumed that these bonds might become long-term as well. Now, Michigan researchers have documented that male chimps develop close relationships with each other that can last up to seven years.

For 14 years, John Mitani, a primatologist at the University of Michigan, spent his summers observing male chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Mitani and his team named the male chimps and documented their activity closely. The chimps and their best friends shared meat, groomed each other, and made sure to get each others’ backs in fights. “[The] males were more social than females, engaged in cooperative acts, and spent time competing for females,” Mitani told DISCOVER.

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The tumor on his genitals had made Henry into an old grouch. At his new home in the Southland Museum and Art Gallery, he was aggressive and unpopular with the ladies. Sure, Henry was already in his 70s—but in tuatara years, he was still in his prime.

Tuataras, a lizard-like reptile belonging to an ancient lineage that has changed little since the time of the dinosaurs, are known for their longevity. They don’t reach sexual maturity until age 20 and many have been known to live past 100.

Henry’s fortunes reversed in 2002, when at the age of 105, he underwent an operation to remove his inconvenient (and cancerous) tumor. Since then, his human caretakers say he has regained a vigor that belies his age. Whereas before the operation, Henry was often kept in solitary confinement due to his foul temper, now he is kept in the company of three female tauturas. Even so, museum keepers were surprised when Henry recently became a father at the age of 111, after a romantic romp with an 80-year-old female named Mildred.

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Does simple arithmetic give you sweaty palms? Do you always show up late for appointments? Is it a nightmare to figure out the bill at restaurants? If so, you may have dyscalculia, sort of the mathematical version of dyslexia.  People with dyscalculia often excel at languages or visual arts, but can barely pass middle school math. They have trouble with numerical concepts—specifically, with associating numerical quantities with their abstract representations.

Although it’s estimated that about five percent of people have dyscalculia, researchers disagree as to the cause of the disorder. The debate boils down to whether number sense is an innate or learned trait in humans. Some argue that we are born with the ability to understand exact numbers. Even babies, for example, will stare longer when they are shown two dolls moving behind a screen and then three dolls coming out, indicating they were expecting a different numerical outcome.

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Spitting cobras are famous for their terrifying defense mechanism: They spit venom directly into an attacker’s eyes, causing severe pain and possibly blindness. Now, scientists have learned that the name “spitting cobra” is a misnomer, since the snake doesn’t actually spit out its venom. Instead, it sprays the poison in geometric patterns such as paired ovals, similar to the way a pitcher winds up to throw a ball.

And how did this astonishing fact come to light? Biologist Bruce Young at the University of Massachusetts Lowell examined the spitting habits of three captive species of cobra…by provoking them to spit venom in his face.

No, he’s not crazy—he wore a visor fitted with an accelerometer, so a computer could trace his eye and head movements in 3D while he taunted the angry reptiles. Young also tracked the snakes’ movements, using high-speed videography to quantify the sway of their heads and electromyography (EMG) to measure the contraction of their head and neck muscles.

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• When robots take over the world, they will start in Japan, which easily tops the Top 10 Countries by Robot Density.

• Huge, naturally formed, spinning circles of ice found in British rivers for the first time.

• Scientists want to exhume Galileo’s corpse to check for a genetic eye condition that may explain errors in his observations.

• One gigantic, zoomable photo of President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

• Wild frogs are being eaten to extinction. “Amphibians are already the most threatened animal group yet assessed because of disease, habitat loss and climate change—man’s massive appetite for their legs is not helping.”

Intrepid psychologists of the less regulated past used to carry out experiments that put not only their subjects, but themselves (or at least their research assistants) in harm’s way. While it was the participants who got the short end of the stick in the likes of Milgram’s electric shock experiment, other experiments called for researchers to do audacious things that would probably get them arrested today.

For example, one experiment [subscription required] from the 1970s called for the researcher to loiter inside a toilet stall and use a periscope to secretly watch men doing their business at the urinals. The purpose of the study was to find out what causes paruresis, or “shy bladder syndrome.” The researcher used a stopwatch to measure delay time and urination time while an accomplice, another researcher, stood at an adjacent urinal or one farther away. The study concluded that invasions of personal space caused longer delay times and shorter urination times. Though a third party can sort of understand why such public voyeurism is needed to capture natural behavior, it would’ve been hard to explain the scientific merit to the man whose urine stream you’ve been staring at.

Scientific American‘s Jesse Bering recounts this and other brave experiments, including a mock rape scene and staring at strangers for a creepily long time. Bering, for one, seems to miss the days when researchers risked their own lives and limbs for science.

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Image: flickr / markhillary

To study the intimate dialogue between romantic partners, psychologists have turned to parsing instant messages. In a new study [pdf], researchers report that the words couples send each other across cyberspace are good indications of relationship health.

The researchers asked 68 dating couples (not surprisingly, the average age was only 19) to submit transcripts of their IMs to each other over a ten day period. The couples were also asked to rate their relationship satisfaction and report six months later whether they were still dating or not.

After analyzing pages upon pages of IM conversations, the team concluded that women who often use the word “I” in IMs are more likely to be in happy, stable relationships. Guys also seem to dig gals who say “I,” reporting greater satisfaction when dating women who referred to themselves in the first person. The researchers explain this correlation with the usual “women tend to be more emotionally expressive.”

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Most normal people gauge the weather by checking online, hitting up the Weather Channel, or falling back on that old standby, looking out the window. But one group of physicists refuses to toe the line, instead predicting local temperatures to within 1°C by checking a particle detector that resides almost half a mile underground. Spending a lot of time way, way beneath the surface of the earth can do this to a person.

The detector, located in a former mine turned particle physic lab in Minnesota, was built as part of a project to study neutrinos, but it can also detect other particles known as muons. When high-energy cosmic rays from outer space collide with atoms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, particles called pions are created, which quickly decay into muons. Muons are negatively charged—sort of like heavier versions of electrons—and many have enough energy to penetrate underground. Muon levels drop in cool weather because cold air is denser, and pions are more likely to get destroyed by colliding with atoms before they have a chance to decay into muons.

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A newly-discovered species of catfish can use its fins for more than swimming. From the top side, Lithogenes wahari looks like any other catfish, except with some extra body armor. But flip it over and you’ll see a giant sucking mouth and a pair of fleshy pelvic fins, which it uses to grasp and shimmy up slippery rocks in fast-flowing rivers.

Scientists first laid eyes on the strange fish 20 years ago in Venezuela. But the only specimen they had was in such bad condition that it “looked like it had been run over by a truck,” recalls researcher Scott Schaefer. It took years before the team was able to locate more of the species, which they found in abundance in a tributary of the Orinoco river.  Capturing L. wahari was easy: the researchers easily picked 84 specimens off of rocks.

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Sure, drugs are too plentiful, prescribed too often, and promoted too heavily. But we’re not above saying that taking a pill can sometimes be a great idea. Like this one, from Proteus Biomedical in Redwood City, California: an ingestible microchip [insert Innerspace joke here] that can be added to any capsule or tablet without altering the medicine and performs an EKG when you swallow it. Made of food ingredients (so it’s non-toxic, though not necessarily vegetarian-safe), the chip reportedly:

has digestible sensors that are made of food products and are activated by stomach fluids. Once swallowed, the sensors can send a digital signal through the body to a receiver. The receiver date- and time-stamps, decodes, and records information about the drug and the dosage. It also measures and reports heart rate, activity, and respiratory rate.

According to USA Today, the receiver could come in the form of a bandage that transmits data to a cellphone, so caregivers or relatives could get a text letting them know when and what pills their charge has taken—or whether they’ve taken them at all.

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Image: iStockPhoto