• Avast ye matey! Indian Ocean pirates arrr trouble for lily-livered climate researchers. OK jokes aside, Somali pirates are such a serious threat that the scientists studying Indian Ocean conditions need an armed escort to carry out their work.

• Nonja the Orangutan can update her own Facebook page. Apparently, she’s also a fan of the camera-phone-too-close-to-the-face profile pic.

• The Iron Curtain not only isolated Eastern Europe, it also kept alien bird species from colonizing it.

• Nepal’s cabinet met today to discuss climate change’s effect on the Himalayas—5,242 meters high at the base of Mount Everest.

• Finally, it’s Friday. Time to kick back, crack open a few space beers, and enjoy the weekend.

Scientists were stunned when they first heard Bonnie whistle. The 30-year-old female orangutan at the Smithsonian National Zoo had never been taught to whistle, but she figured out the trick all by herself back in the 1980s, according to her caretakers. That makes her the first documented case of a primate spontaneously mimicking the sounds of another species—in this case, humans.

Though she can’t carry a tune, Bonnie seems to enjoy whistling and will usually happily comply when asked to do it. You can even watch her whistle on Youtube. The researchers, who published a paper on Bonnie in the journal Primates [subscription required], say she also taught another orangutan, Indah, how to whistle. Bonnie and Indah dispel the theory that orangutan vocalizations are only involuntary reactions to stimuli, and are mainly determined by evolutionary factors.

Instead, whistling orangutans suggest that orangutans can learn and teach each other new vocalizations. This would explain why separate populations of orangutans in the wild seem to maintain different repertoires of sounds—which can include screams, grumbles, barks, raspberries, and kiss squeaks.

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