Smart crows

University of Auckland, New Zealand: Embargoed for release: 16-Aug-2007, 12:00 Eastern US Time

For a long time humans were believed to be the only living things that used tools. Animals weren't thought to be smart enough. But then scientists found chimps using rocks to crack nuts. They saw gorillas testing water depth with a stick before stepping in. They observed orangutans slipping twigs into fruit to get seeds.

Great apes might not put up shelves in the study or a fence in the garden. But they can make and use tools in hundreds of different ways - usually to get food.

This is not too surprising, really, since chimps, gorillas and orangutans are our closest living relatives. But birds are pretty bird-brained, aren't they? There is surely no chance that they can use tools.

Well as a matter of fact they do. Scientists have known for some time that New Caledonian crows don't just use complex tools to get food - they actually make them. Now these same birds have been observed doing some creative thinking to use one tool to get at another.

The findings appear in the online Current Biology on August 16. The researchers who did the work are at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

The birds' skills in the use of tools, say the researchers, rival those seen in the great apes. What's more, it seems that the birds may have solved their problem using something called analogical reasoning.

This is a much more advanced type of thinking than simple trial and error. A person using it - or a crow - has to be able to see a new situation as somehow the same as something they've met before.

Analogical reasoning is why humans are so inventive, right from their earliest use of stone tools. It is what drives human innovation. It is the "hallmark of human intelligence", says Russell Gray of the University of Auckland. (It is also a rich source of humour.)

Both the great apes and the New Caledonian crows may be using analogical reasoning, says Gray. This may explain why "out of all the crow species in the world, only these crows routinely make and use tools."

In the study, the researchers presented crows with meat in a hole. A stick was available but it wasn't long enough to reach the meat. The birds needed to get a long stick out of a "toolbox" to get the meat from the hole.

There was another catch. The long stick was also out of reach. The creative thing the crows did was to use the short stick to get the long one out of the box, said Alex Taylor, also of the University of Auckland.

"They could then use the long stick to get the meat."

In a second experiment, the researchers reversed the positions of the two sticks. The small stick was now inside the toolbox while the long stick was handy. The crows briefly probed the box containing the short stick using the long stick. But they quickly corrected their mistake and took the long stick straight to the hole to get the meat.

These were hard problems for the crows, especially the first one, Gray said. "It was surprising to find that these 'bird-brained' creatures performed at the same levels as the best performances by great apes."

Six out of seven crows tried to get the long stick with the short stick at their first try at solving the problem.

"To do this, they had to inhibit their normal response of trying to get the food directly with the short stick and realize that they could use the short stick to get the long stick."

So let's hear no more about birds being bird-brained.

###

Taylor et al.: "Spontaneous Metatool Use by New Caledonian Crows." Publishing in Current Biology 17, 1-4, September 4, 2007. DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2007.07.057. http://www.current-biology.com

More help with words

ancestor

breed

comparing

fertile

orangutans

particular

What's it all about?

1. Animals used to be thought to be not smart enough to do something. What was that?
2. Give one piece of evidence we now have that shows this was wrong.
3. Why is it not too surprising that great apes use tools?
4. What other living things use tools and make them?
5. What type of thinking have these been found to use?
6. In which country do the scientists work who have done the research reported in this story?
7. What word does the writer use to say that the crows are about as skilful as the great apes in their use of tools?
8. When people use analogical reasoning they borrow an idea from a situation they have --- before, to help them work out what to do in a new situation.
9. This seems to be what great apes do sometimes and what the New Caledonian crows did in this experiment. Are the scientists sure the crows used analogical reasoning?
10. Which word in the article gives you the answer to the last question? The word is used twice in the paragraph that begins "Both the great apes and the New Caledonian crows ..."
11. In the experiment the crows were trying to get meat out of a hole using a stick. But the stick they could use wasn't ---- enough to reach the meat.
12. What was the creative thing the crows did with this short stick?
13. Try to explain in one sentence what the scientists mean when they say that this was creative.
14. After the crows had learned to use the short stick to reach the long one, the scientists swapped the sticks around. Can you think why they did this second experiment?
15. In one sentence how does an animal or a person use trial and error to solve a problem?
16. In one sentence how does an animal or a person use analogical reasoning to solve a problem?
17. Why do the scientists believe the crows used analogical reasoning rather than trial and error to solve their problem?
18. Imagine you are these scientists. Can you think of a question you would still like to answer about these crows, and the way they solve problems?
19. How could you try to answer that question?

More science teaching resources for this story

Smart crows UK US

Topic for discussion, research or pupil presentations

Students should watch the 12-minute video of bird brain researcher Erich Jarvis This is educationally instructive and thought-provoking in many ways.

The following is simply one possible discussion topic. Teachers of science will be able to think of a host of others.

The video is accessible equally to committed science students and to those whose interest in science is more cursory or even non-existent.

This accessibility, as can be seen from the feedback, gives rise to strong criticism from a scientist who self-deprecatingly calls himself GrumpyOldGeek.

There is nothing self-deprecating about Grumpy’s criticisms, however, which include comments like:

“I'd *much* rather watch a segment about hard science than a fluff piece that would better be presented in "People" magazine. My time is valuable and I really don't care whether or not Mr. Jarvis knows ballet and thinks that birds' brain parts should have a different name.”

The exchanges between Grumpy and someone who calls himself Kaba are rather heated, quite entertaining and very instructive. Students should read as much or as little of this as they feel like. Then working in groups they should try to boil down into one sentence what each of the disputants is saying.

They should then, by discussion among themselves, try to reach consensus about which of the two positions they most agree with – and why.

Tips for science class discussions and groupwork

No 58

I am a recent convert of cooperative learning. I attended a 3-day workshop at SUNY Stony Brook that sold me on POGIL- Process Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning. I had wanted to do this, but I didn´t know how to implement it. Now that I have gone to this workshop, I am going to do it each and every Friday, or last day of the week. POGIL will work if you do a couple of things:

1. YOU must set up the groups, not the students. If you don´t know your students very well, look at their past grade history and ensure that you mix them as much as possible. putting all the As with the As only ensures that they will perform best, or might fight over the lead role all the time.

2. Keep the groups consistent. I am doing my groups every week on Fridays as a way to get this going very strongly. Don´t change the people in the group unless it is absolutely sure that the group cannot work together.

3. Don´t look at it as something additional. Be ready to change your lecture. As you move on with groups, the idea will be that the students are doing better at understanding the concepts and you won´t need to lecture as much on the topics covered.

4. Don´t think you can do something else, while they are on the assignment. One thing becomes very clear, you need to be a real facilitator, we are talking about teenagers after all and you need to keep track of time and keep everyone on task.

If you want to know more, don´t hesitate to contact me. To find out more about POGIL specifically for Chemistry teachers, go to: http://www.pogil.org

Extract from a contribution to an online forum of the National Science Teachers Association, by James Smith, AP Chemistry and General Chemistry, Perth Amboy High School, USA

Orangutans play charades

University of St Andrews, Scotland: Embargoed for release: 2-Aug-2007

Orangutans play charades

When orangutans make gestures to get their point across, they are using the same methods that people do when they play charades. Captive orangutans deliberately change or repeat signals depending on whether their audience 'got it' the first time.

The research is published in 2 August issue of the journal Current Biology.

The St Andrews University scientists were surprised that the orangutans were so clearly working out whether their audience understood what they were 'saying', says Professor Richard Byrne. “Looking at the tapes of the animal’s responses, you can easily work out whether the orangutan thinks it has been fully, partially or not understood."

This means that the great apes are passing information back to their audience about how well they have understood them, Byrne says. "Hence our charades analogy."

In playing the game of charades, we humans try to get our meaning across without words, using only gestures. And we also try to help our own team with hints about how they are doing - just as the orangutans have now been found to do.

The experiment that showed this was set up by Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne. Their aim was to find out if orangutans intend to communicate with people through gesture. This is a skill that has already been found in chimpanzees.

The scientists presented six captive orangutans with two different food items. One was tasty to them. The other wasn't. Both could only be reached with human help.

There was another catch. The scientists sometimes pretended not to understand the orangutans’ requests. So they would sometimes give them only half of the delicious treat. Or they would hand over the yuckier food instead.

When the human didn't get it right the orangutans kept trying to make them understand, the researchers report. When the humans seemed to partly understand, the animals narrowed down their range of signals.

They focused on gestures already used and they repeated them - just as humans do in charades. But when the humans seemed to completely misunderstand, the orangutans tried new gestures. They did not repeat the failed signals.

This showed that the orangutan intended a particular result, Cartmill says. "It anticipated getting it and kept trying until it got the result."

The orangutans made a clear distinction between total misunderstanding and partial misunderstanding, she says. In the first case they gave up on signals they'd used already. They tried new ones to get the message across. In the second case "they tended to repeat the signals that had already partially worked, keeping at it with vigour.

"The result is that understanding can be achieved more quickly.”

The charades strategy is one way to build a shared lexicon from learned signals, the researchers say.

So more study of how apes communicate could help us learn about how the earliest forms of human language began.

Cartmill et al.: “Orangutans Modify Their Gestural Signaling According to Their Audience’s Comprehension.” Publishing in Current Biology 17, 1–4, August 7, 2007 DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.069. www.current-biology.com

More help with words

variety

great apes

report

What's it all about?

1. What animal is this story about?
2. Have the scientists been studying the animal in the wild?
3. What word in the second sentence gave you the answer to the last question?
4. At which university do the scientists work?
5. Which country is this in?
6. In the game of charades people don’t use words. Instead they try to get a message across to other people using --------.
7. They also try to help their own team with ----- about how they are doing.
8. The aim of the experiment was to find out if orangutans ------ to get messages across to people using gestures.
9. This has already been found in another animal. Which one?
10. Six orangutans were used in the experiment and two types of food. What was the main difference between the two types of food?
11. Could the orangutans get the food by themselves?
12. Somehow the orangutans had to make the humans ---------- them.
13. Explain in one sentence why the humans pretended not to understand what the orangutans were trying to tell them.
14. Give an example from the article of the humans partly understanding what the orangutans were trying to tell them.
15. What did the orangutans do if the humans seemed to partly understand?
16. If the humans seemed not to understand at all what did the orangutans do?
17. Can humans tell the difference between being partly understood and not being understood at all?
18. Do you think cats could? Or goldfish or canaries?
19. What do you think this tells us about orangutans’ brains?
20. Why might you expect to find a skill in orangutans that had already been found in chimpanzees?
21. If you were these scientists can you think of one question you would still like to answer about how orangutans try to communicate?
22. How could you try to answer that question?

More science teaching resources

Orangutans play charades UK US

Topic for discussion, research or pupil presentations

The following is extracted and adapted from a Discovery School lesson

Ask students to describe how apes, such as orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas, are usually portrayed on TV or in the movies. Do they think the media portray the great apes realistically?

Rather than being cute, comical or dangerous, apes are highly intelligent – as this latest research clearly shows. They have been seen to use tools in thoughtful ways, exhibit self-awareness and demonstrate an empathic understanding of what other apes or humans are thinking and feeling.

Invite your students to imagine that they are working with the scientists at St Andrews. What kinds of experiments would they design in order to assess the thinking abilities of an orangutan?

Help students with their their ideas by asking what signs of intelligence they would look for.

Ask student working in groups to design four experiments: one that will assess an orangutan’s memory, one that will assess an orangutan's creativity, one that will assess an orangutan's ability to communicate, and one that will assess a factor that the students determine themselves.

Before they begin, review with them the requirements for a well-designed experiment, including the idea of a control group.

For each experiment that their groups devise, individual students should write one paragraph explaining what hypothesis it is designed to test and what results they expect to get from it.

When their work is complete, the teacher can conduct “scientific peer-review sessions” in which students review and critique each other’s experimental ideas.

Discussion Questions

1. Researchers are trying to learn how closely ape and human learning and behaviour resemble each other. One way is by teaching apes sign language. Even though these experiments don’t harm the apes, some people still object to this because the apes don’t get to choose whether or not to participate in the experiments. Debate whether animal experimentation of this kind is ethical

2. Apes can't speak because their vocal cords are different from those of humans. Since the 1940s scientists have been testing if meaningful communication between humans and apes is possible using a symbolic language. Their results have often seemed promising. One famous gorilla called Koko seems to have learned how to “speak” with American Sign Language. But some scientists have hotly disputed the results. Ask your students to use magazines, news reports and the Internet to research Koko’s sign language communications – what the scientists involved with the project claim to have discovered, and the criticisms of their methods and results. (A good place to start is www.gorilla.org.)

When their research is complete, ask them to write a set of questions whose answers could determine if Koko can actually understand sign language. Then divide students into pairs to critique each other’s experimental methods. Conclude with a class discussion about the questions the students developed and the difficulties in assessing Koko’s ability to communicate.

Suggested Reading

The Great Apes: Our Face in Nature’s Mirror. Michael Leach. Sterling Publishing, Inc., 1996. “Our closest living relatives are slowly being driven to extinction. Why? What can be done about it? As you read this poignant book, you’ll learn about the true nature of these animals as they live and behave in their natural habitat.”

Tips for science class discussions and groupwork

No 57

Marzano, in "Classroom Instruction that Works" notes that each time you set up the group, you need to remind them of the parameters, roles, etc. I have found that this is very true and when I do - even daily and occasionally within the class - remind them about how to work well in groups; I get much better results.

I find the most effective strategies for me are: a) make sure that everyone rotates through roles (even at high school level) and b) the group members get a stake in the evaluation process. Group grades and individual grades are important - I tell kids that I expect them to be honest, because if there is group work going on, then I am watching - and I will know it's wrong if the group that fought constantly gave themselves all A's (a rubric with a point system is better for evaluations - I like the way the one that someone posted for notebooks on the biology list is set up: http://www.journeytoexcellence.org/practice/instruction/theories/miscideas/notebook_evaluation.phtml

By the way - some good rubric examples on this site too; very impressive resource.

For some additional thoughts - check out: http://www.netc.org/focus/strategies/coop.php among others (Google

"Marzano cooperative learning").

Extract from a contribution to an online forum of the National Science Teachers Association by Kathleen M. Gorski, Ph.D., Kathleen M. Gorski, Ph.D., Master Teacher, The Nativity School of Worcester.

Renewables fail

Rockefeller University, New York: 25-Jul-2007 01:00 Eastern US Time

Renewables fail environmental test

Renewable does not mean green. This is the surprising result of research done by Professor Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University, New York. We might be able to build enough wind farms to produce all the energy the world needs, he says. Or dam enough rivers. Or grow enough biomass.

But we will wreck the environment if we do.

Ausubel worked out the power each kind of renewable energy produces for a given area of land that it disturbs. In other words he calculated power per square metre.

He showed that renewable energy needs enormous areas of land. He compares the destruction of nature by renewables with the space needed by nuclear power.

Nuclear energy is green," he says. "Considered in watts per square metre, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors." His research appears in Inderscience's International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology*.

Economies of scale help technologies to succeed, Ausubel points out. But there are no economies of scale with renewables. Just the opposite. More power from renewables means more land is used up. In fact the area needed for each kilowatt of power most likely increases.

This is because land that is good for wind, hydro-electricity, biomass or solar power would get used up first.

Looking at each renewable in turn paints a grim picture of their impact on the environment.

Take hydro-electricity. Suppose the entire province of Ontario, Canada were flooded with all the rain that falls on it in a year. Then store all this behind a 60 metre dam.

This would still generate just 80% of the energy produced by Canada's existing nuclear power stations. Put another way, each square kilometre of dammed land would provide electricity for just 12 Canadians.

Biomass energy is also horribly inefficient and destructive of nature. Vast areas would have to be harvested each year to produce power for a large part of the USA. To get the same electricity from biomass as from one nuclear power plant would take 2500 square kilometres of prime Iowa land.

"Increased use of biomass fuel in any form is criminal," says Ausubel. "Humans must spare land for nature. Every automobile would require a pasture of 1-2 hectares."

What about wind? A wind farm is three to ten times smaller than a biomass farm, Ausubel says. But 770 square kilometres of land are still needed to produce as much energy as one nuclear plant (generating 1000 megawatts electrical).

To supply the electricity the US used in 2005 would have taken a wind farm the size of Texas. This would have been covered with structures to extract, store and transport the energy. Even this is wildly optimistic, since it assumes round-the-clock wind at just the right speed.

One hundred square metres is a good size for a Manhattan apartment. But a far greater area would be needed to extract wind energy to run its laundry, microwave oven, plasma TV and computer. New York City would need every square metre of Connecticut turned into wind farms to power its electrical equipment.

Solar power is not the answer either. You could build a solar cell plant that would produce the same electricity as a 1000 megawatts nuclear power plant. But you'd have to paint 150 square kilometres of land black to do it. And you would need more land for storage and retrieval of the energy.

Every form of renewable energy needs vast infrastructure - concrete, steel, roads, Ausubel says. "As a Green, one of my credos is 'no new structures'. But renewables all involve ten times or more stuff per kilowatt as natural gas or nuclear."

The full footprint of uranium mining adds just a few hundred square kilometres.

There are certainly concerns about waste storage, safety and security. But the dense heart of the atom offers by far the smallest footprint of any energy source. Economies of scale would mean that the nuclear industry could increase the amount of energy it produces while shrinking the size of its power plants, Ausubel says.

This is what has happened in the computer industry. With investment and research, computers have grown steadily smaller and much more powerful.

"If we want to minimise new structures and the rape of nature, nuclear energy is the best option," says Ausubel.

"Renewables may be renewable, but they are not green."

*"Renewable and nuclear heresies", International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2007 229-243.

More help with words

atom

benefit

element

energy

fossil fuels

fossilised

mass

nuclear reactor

nucleus

particle

power

preserved

What's it all about?

1. The first paragraph mentions three kinds of renewable energy. Name two of them.
2. What will happen if we use any of these sources of renewable energy to supply all the energy the world needs?
3. What kind of science is this story talking about? Did Ausubel do an experiment, or do a calculation or do something else?
4. Ausubel compared the effects of using renewable energy to produce electricity with another way of producing electricity. What is that other way?
5. "Watts per square meter" is the kind of shorthand that scientists use. Square meters are a way of measuring ----.
6. Watts are a way of measuring power. So "watts per square meter" tells you the ----- produced by different power stations for the same area of land used up.
7. The phrase "astronomical advantages" means that nuclear power stations produce much power in the form of ----------- than renewables.
8. There is another way of looking at this. A power station that uses solar energy , biomass or wind turbines to produce electricity takes up an enormous amount of ----.
9. The story gives examples taken from Ausubel's research on how much land you have to use up to get useful energy from renewables. It talks first about ----- -----------.
10. Suppose we shut down all 25 of Canada's nuclear power stations. Then try to replace them with hydro-electric power stations. Ausubel shows that you need a dam much bigger than the whole province of ------- to do this.
11. Ausubel looks next at -------.
12. He says we would need to use the trees or plants from ---- square kilometers of "prime Iowa land" to get the same energy as from one nuclear power station
13. What do you think this prime land is used for now?
14. Wind power uses up less land than biomass but far more than nuclear. What would you have to do to Texas to produce enough electricity from the wind for the whole USA?
15. Is solar power any better?
16. Besides the power stations themselves, renewables also need new roads, buildings, cables and storage systems. What one word does the writer use for all of this?
17. There are concerns about nuclear energy. State two of them.
18. People who study how things are made and sold often talk about economies of scale. This means that the more of something you make the ------- it is to make each one.
19. You get economies of scale with nuclear energy Ausubel says. But you don't get them with renewable energy. In one sentence and your own words explain why that is.
20. What is the main conclusion of Ausubel's work?
21. Imagine you are a scientist. Think up one question you would like to have answered about all this.
22. How would you go about answering that question?

More teaching resources for this story

Renewables fail UK US

Topic for discussion, research or pupil presentations

The science in this story is simple – if you're a scientist. Young people still at school have a lot of misconceptions about energy and power, which is not surprising since it took scientists themselves many centuries to get it right.

Research shows that children often believe energy is intimately linked with being alive; they confuse energy with force; they see it as a type of fuel or a kind of fluid. These different misconceptions can often be held by the same person in different situations.

To try to make things clearer to young people in school, "more time should be devoted to qualitative questions", according to researcher Reinders Duit*, and "students should be advised to explain the physical phenomena in their own words".

This story provides a good opportunity to do precisely that. Working in groups students should tackle any or all of the following questions, some of which require research.

1 Fuel can be used up but energy can't. Explain this.

2 Imagine a power cut that lasts a whole day. Make a list of the things you do each day that you could no longer do. What if the power cut lasted a week, a month, a year?

3 Do the What kind of science news? exercises above. These are likely to generate even more debate and discussion than usual.

4 Using the results from these exercises try to answer the following questions: 1) What science has Ausubel actually done? 2) Are there any new discoveries in the story? 3) So what kind of story is this?

5 Make a list of the steps (no more than half a dozen for each) in getting electricity from wind, dammed water, biomass and solar cells. Then do the same for nuclear. In what way are solar cells different to all the others?

6 Confusion about concepts is not helped by the use of many different units for energy and power. These include joules and calories, and for electricity a set of units that sounds like they should be power but are actually energy – kilowatt-hours and megawatt-hours. There is also the fact that the calorie in everyday use is a perfectly respectable unit of energy but not the same one physicists use. It's a thousand times as large, and physicists call it the kilocalorie.

Working in groups, students should create as many examples as they can that illustrate joules (lifting an apple a metre in the air, dropping a bag of sugar), kilocalories (heating a kilogram of water, converting chocolate to motion) and kilowatt-hours. They should then attempt to create some way of picturing the amount of energy that the US used in 2005. That figure, according to Ausubel, was 4 million megawatt-hours – which is a whole lot of chocolate bars.

7 In the paper itself Ausubel describes himself as a Green, and goes on to say: "I should mention that I am not naïve about nuclear. Privileged to work with Soviet colleagues who participated in the Chernobyl clean-up, I saw the Dead Zone in 1990 with my own eyes. I visited the concrete sarcophagus encasing the blasted reactor …".

In one sentence students should answer this question: What is a Green?

*Duit, R. (1983) Energy conceptions held by students and consequences for science teaching In: Helm, H. and Novak, J.D. (eds). Proceedings of the International Seminar: Misconceptions in Science and Mathematics, 20-22 June 1983, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. pp 316-323

Tips for science class discussions and groupwork

No 56

The connection between science and literacy is the subject of much attention in the science education community. This attention comes in large part from three sources. One is the growing body of research in science teaching and learning that suggests that language is essential for effective science learning – for clarity of thought, description, discussion and argument, as well as for recording and presentation of results. In addition to engaging in direct investigation of scientific phenomena, students make meaning by writing science, talking science and reading science. At the root of deep understanding of science concepts and scientific processes is the ability to

Extract from Douglas, R. (ed.) et al. (2006) Linking Science & Literacy in the K-9 Classroom. Arlington: NSTA Press.