Researchers believe that young chimps have a photographic memory.

Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match humans in memory and other mental skills.
“There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,“ said lead researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University, BBC reported.
“No one can imagine that chimpanzees--young chimpanzees at the age of five--have a better performance in a memory task than humans.
“Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection-- better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.“
Dr Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving numbers.
The mothers and their five-year-old offspring had already been taught to “count“ from one to nine.
During the experiment, each subject was presented with various numerals from one to nine on a touch screen monitor.
The numbers were then replaced with blank squares and the test subject had to remember which number appeared in which location, then touch the appropriate square.
They found that, in general, the young chimps performed better than their mothers and the adult humans.
The university students were slower than all of the three young chimpanzees in their response.
The researchers then varied the amount of time that the numbers appeared on-screen to compare the working memory of humans and chimps.
Chimps performed much better than university students in speed and accuracy when the numbers appeared only briefly on screen.
The shortest time duration, 210 milliseconds, did not leave enough time for the subjects to explore the screen by eye movement--something we do all the time when we read.
This is evidence, the researchers believe, that young chimps have a photographic memory which allows them to memorize a complex scene or pattern at a glance. This is sometimes present in human children but declines with age, they say.
“Young chimpanzees have a better memory than human adults,“ Dr Matsuzawa told BBC News.

The United Nations watchdog on endangered species said it is launching a database to track the international trade in caviar and tackle its illegal trade.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species said the database will record details of all permits and certificates that authorize trade in caviar, and will help detect and deter fraudulent applications, AFP reported.
“This is an important tool in our battle to save sturgeons and fight criminals who seek to over exploit a number of species of great conservation concern,“ CITES Secretary General Willem Wijnstekers said.
Legal export of caviar has fallen in recent years as wild sturgeon stocks have declined.
Earlier this year, CITES said that states bordering the Caspian Sea agreed to reduce their catch quotas by 29 percent compared to 2005 levels, allowing the export of 3.76 tons of Beluga caviar this year.
However, CITES “continues to receive frequent evidence of illegal caviar trade, including in Beluga,“ the organization said in a statement.
CITES first imposed caviar trade controls in 1998, after a decline in sturgeon stocks following the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Fishing had increased with the end of communist-era restrictions, raising fears among environmentalists that sturgeon would be wiped out.

More than one billion trees were planted around the world in 2007, with Ethiopia and Mexico leading in the drive to combat climate change through new lush forest projects, a UN report said.
The Nairobi-based UN Environment Program (UNEP) said the mass tree planting, inspired by Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai, will help mitigate effects of pollution and environmental deterioration.
“An initiative to catalyze the pledging and the planting of one billion trees has achieved and indeed surpassed its mark. It is a further sign of the breathtaking momentum witnessed this year on the challenge for this generation--climate change,“ UNEP chief Achim Steiner said in a statement, AFP reported.
“Millions if not billions of people around this world want an end to pollution and environmental deterioration and have rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty to prove the point,“ he added.
UNEP said the total number of trees planted is still being collated, but developing countries top the list with more than 700 million and 217 million planted in Ethiopia and Mexico respectively.
Ethiopia’s high demand for fuel wood and land for cropping and grazing has slashed its forest cover from about 35 percent of its landmass in the early 20th century to just 4.2 percent by 2000, environmentalist say.
Others planters include: Turkey 150 million, Kenya 100 million, Cuba 96.5 million, Rwanda 50 million, South Korea 43 million, Tunisia 21 million, Morocco 20 million, Myanmar 20 million and Brazil 16 million.
Maathai’s Green Belt Movement planted 4.7 million trees, double the number it had initially pledged, according to UNEP. The army has participated in re-afforestation drives in Kenya and Mexico.
UNEP said China, Guatemala and Spain are expected soon to announce new plantings of millions of trees.
Experts say that trees help absorb carbon contained in the heat-trapping gases blamed for climate change, which are largely generated by human activity and are one of the most perilous environmental challenges in the modern world.
The Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), which co-organized the campaign, said the success indicated that environment can be rescued by afforestation.
“This milestone shows clearly that the global community has the spirit and the substance to unite in achieving ambitious targets to create a better environment for all,“ said ICRAF Director General Dennis Garrity.
The UNEP, citing its credible tracking system, said 1.56 billion trees have been planted around the world, but had so far received pledges of 2.24 billion trees.
The mass planting, carried by governments, communities, corporations and individuals, will continue despite surpassing the one billion mark, the agency said.

A child stands near damaged peatland in Kuala Cenaku, Indonesia, 03 November 2007.

Indonesia is one of the nations most vulnerable to climate change and is already feeling some of the consequences of global warming, environmental group WWF said in a new report.
The report, which cites an array of studies, said that annual rainfall in the archipelago nation has fallen by two to three percent, while average temperatures have risen by 0.3 degrees Celsius (33 degrees Fahrenheit), AFP reported.
A high population density--the nation is the fourth most populous in the world--coupled with some 80,000 kilometers (50,000 miles) of coastline, left it extremely at risk from rises in global temperatures, WWF said.
Global sea levels are rising at about two millimeters per year and are projected to accelerate to a rate of about five millimeters annually over the next century.
“A change of this magnitude will undoubtedly result in significant losses of Indonesia’s... coastline and thousands of islands and the associated marine resources,“ the report said.
Fitrian Ardiansyah, director of WWF-Indonesia’s climate and energy program, said in a statement that the impact would be widespread.
“As rainfall decreases during critical times of the year this translates into higher drought risk, consequently a decrease in crop yields, economic instability and drastically more undernourished people,“ he said.
“This will undo Indonesia’s progress against poverty and food insecurity.“
The report concludes that Indonesia needs to draft ways to address climate change.

Hara mangrove forest on Iran's Qeshm Island.

A lesser spotted woodpecker

Some woodland bird numbers have fallen by up to 20 percent in the past two decades a study of bird populations across 20 European countries revealed.
A separate, smaller study suggested that the situation could be even worse in Britain, with populations falling by more than 25 percent.
Experts believe that changes in the management and type of woodland, combined with warming temperatures from climate change, have made it harder for many forest birds to find food and nesting sites, reported Telegraph.co.uk.
Researchers identified 11 species that had reached critical levels and are in need of urgent conservation.
Richard Gregory of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who chairs the European Bird Census Council, warned that species such as the lesser spotted woodpecker and the wryneck were no longer breeding in the UK.
“These birds are in danger right across Europe,“ he said. “They are not just disappearing here in the UK, but on a much wider scale.
“Our paper highlights 11 species that for the first time are in real trouble right across Europe. They are quite different birds, however, with different specialisms.“
The report, in the scientific journal Ibis, uses data from bird conservation charities and ecology centers across Europe.
A third of the 90 forest birds examined have declined since the 1980s. Specialist birds such as woodpeckers have fallen by 18 percent, and more common species, such as the nightingale by 13 percent.
A second study by the British Trust for Ornithology revealed the worst hit areas in the UK. It showed tree pipit sightings in south east England having fallen by 96 percent, and willow warbler sightings dropping by 86 percent in east England.
Chris Hewson, of the BTO, said: “These declines are not just a random problem but symptomatic of something far more widespread.“

Apart from protecting their kids from the trauma of divorce, discontented couples might just have another reason to stick together--environment.
For the first time, scientists have calculated the extent to which divorce damages the environment.
Researchers from the Michigan University studied 12 countries and found that the collective use of electricity across the two new households created rose 53 percent while water use was up by 42 percent, wrote ANI.
Across America, for instance, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2005 that could have been saved if the families had not separated.
Broken couples also raise demand for house building and infrastructure such as new roads, the authors said.
“The global trend of soaring divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, has taken up more space and has gobbled up more energy and water,“ Times Online quoted lead author Jianguo Liu.
The study discovered that the average number of rooms per household was between 33 percent and 95 percent higher for divorced couples than for married ones.
Liu also quantified that America now has an extra 38.5m rooms in houses and apartments built to meet the demand for more accommodation caused by divorce over the past three decades.
The growth of single-person households is also damaging the environment, he said.
He also showed that one-person households are the biggest consumers of energy, land and household goods, such as washing machines, refrigerators, TVs and stereos, and per capita, as they consume 38 percent more products, 42 percent more packaging, 55 percent more electricity and 61 percent more gas per capita than four-person households.
People living alone create 11/2 tons of waste annually compared with a ton by those in households of four or more, the study said.

Canadians who enjoyed last winter’s mild temperatures and relatively light snowfall better get ready to bundle up--it’s going to be a cold one.
Environment Canada announced that winter this year is expected to be the coldest in nearly 15 years. From December through February, conditions are forecast to be the harshest since the early 1990s, reported Nationalpost.com.
Southwestern Ontario and parts of northern Canada are the only areas expected to experience the usual weather this winter.
The last time Canada experienced such a cold season was in 1994, when temperatures dropped as low as -42C before factoring in the wind chill.Environment Canada has forecast regular amounts of snow, although cities such as Calgary, Regina and Toronto could get more than usual.

A Sumatran rhinoceros has been photographed in peninsular Malaysia in the first sighting for more than a decade, raising hopes the animal can avoid extinction, a report said.
The New Straits Times said the image, captured by a camera trap, snapped just a small part of the rhino but experts declared the wrinkly and folded thigh was unmistakable, reported AFP.
Rhino footprints were last found in southern Johor state in 2001 but it was only in 1994, when a stray animal wandered out of a forest in northern Perak where the animal was last sighted in the wild, according to the newspaper.
The report did not reveal where the rhino was snapped, but said the photo was taken in a wildlife corridor targeted by the Wildlife and National Parks Department which also spotted elephants, sun bears and the bison-like gaur.
“We’re going back to areas where the rhinos were once recorded, looking for more signs and taking samples,“ said Siti Hawa Yatim, head of the department’s biodiversity conservation division.