The uncanny valley effect (too many previous posts to list) has been blamed for poor acceptance of human-analogue robots (YT) and computer simulations (not to mention the box office results for The Polar Express, Beowulf, and other computer-animated movies). But did you know that humans are not the only primate species to experience this "too close for comfort" effect? A recent behavioral study in macaque monkeys suggests (pdf) that the uncanny valley may be hardwired into our brains at a deeper level (i.e., earlier-evolved) than previously thought.
posted by supercres on Nov 2, 2009 - 39 comments

"But after five months, something clicked. The monkeys picked out red and green, again and again." UW researchers use gene therapy to give squirrel monkeys trichromatic vision. “Not only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.”
posted by spitefulcrow on Sep 16, 2009 - 72 comments

Monkeys react to music composed specifically for them, using monkey calls. Cellist David Teie, working with psychologist Charles Snowdon, has created music based on monkey calls that successfully affects the emotional state of tamarinds. Turns out that they don't like human music, except possibly Metallica. What can you do with this information? Well, you could buy - or, hey, create - music for your cat.
posted by mygothlaundry on Sep 2, 2009 - 31 comments

The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn. A review of Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism : A Writer's Manifesto. [more inside]
posted by shoesfullofdust on Jun 19, 2009 - 71 comments

National Geographic's photographic history of monkeys in space.
posted by Joe Beese on Jun 2, 2009 - 15 comments

Japanese snow monkeys in Yamanouchi have developed a neat trick - they bathe in the region's hot springs. Here's another gallery. There's even a webcam! [more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia on Apr 17, 2009 - 23 comments

Revealing how we are just a bunch of monkeys... (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Mar 28, 2009 - 15 comments

Look at This Cat! Not to be confused with look at this dog, look at this muppet (wat a donut...), robots and donuts, monkeys and robots, monkeys on stilts, twin monkeys, koala twins, or celebrities without makeup. [via mefi projects]
posted by ooga_booga on Feb 3, 2009 - 73 comments

Mini Monkees Of Brazil
posted by vronsky on Oct 13, 2008 - 17 comments

Mail-Order Friends: The Comic Book Squirrel Monkeys
posted by An Infinity Of Monkeys on Sep 29, 2008 - 14 comments

"The Guardian has been granted exclusive and unfettered access to one of the most controversial research facilities at a British university." Caring or cruel? Inside the primate laboratory. Audio slideshow. A necessary evil - Colin Blakemore. Wise monkeys - Gill Langley.
posted by fearfulsymmetry on May 31, 2008 - 36 comments

Enjoy 10 variously attributed^* vintage Monkey Cartoons and more courtesy STWALLSKULL and BOOM!
Also available for your viewing pleasure, an itemized list with embeddable links: [more inside]
posted by carsonb on Apr 12, 2008 - 3 comments

A troop of putty-nosed monkeys in west Africa has been found to use a rudimentary language.
posted by chuckdarwin on Mar 11, 2008 - 88 comments

Monkey Portraits: Allegories of Brand Loyalty, by Laurie Hogin. [Via Right Some Good.] [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Jan 4, 2008 - 10 comments

"Significantly, the percentage of monkeys and humans who avoid alcohol is the same." [YouTube]
posted by finite on Dec 10, 2007 - 28 comments

Look at that tail! Stephen Nash has illustrated the most endangered primates (image gallery: part 1, part 2) -- so faithfully over the years that one now bears his name. The just-released "Primates in Peril" report has full profiles of each animal, along with all of Nash's illustrations (including those replaced by photos in the gallery above -- don't miss the sumatran orangutan!).
posted by salvia on Oct 30, 2007 - 6 comments

I laughed, I cried, and I welcomed our new Pan-Homo Culture [more inside]
posted by svenvog on Sep 23, 2007 - 58 comments

Incredibly expressive portraits of apes and monkeys by photographer Jill Greenberg whose pictures of crying babies raised heckles last year.
posted by Kattullus on Sep 17, 2007 - 71 comments

Notes towards the complete works of Shakespeare [pdf] by Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan. (About the authors.) Documentation. "Making of" video. [previously discussed, but never actually linked]. From the same people: Carbon Life Form, a small Mac application that will die of starvation unless you feed it files.
posted by dersins on Aug 24, 2007 - 6 comments

Brazilian Blogger Bashing! The respected Brazilian newspaper Estadao decided to promote its new online presence by jokingly producing a series of ads with obvious misfits and asking such questions as "Is this the guy giving you dating advice?" and a video (youtube) comparing bloggers to monkeys. Bloggers are outraged "Why would you read a newspaper that compares bloggers to monkeys?". In today's newspaper, Estadao offers no apology but instead dryly recounts the facts. Meanwhile, the resulting controversy, with thousands of blogs weighing in, has driven a lot of traffic to their new site.
posted by vacapinta on Aug 21, 2007 - 25 comments

Illustrator Apelad has many various projects & flickrsets, including the fairly well known Laugh Out Loud Cats & the Hodgman inspired Hobo Names project, but some of the lesser known ones are awesome as well, including this set of images created for common HTTP Errors, this Alphabet of Monsters, and a personal favorite, Monkey!, wherein users send in a monkey description and receive in return a drawing.
posted by jonson on Jul 8, 2007 - 11 comments

DailyHub - "Social Content for Business Geeks". A Digg-esque aggregator that purports to be grown up.
posted by Burhanistan on Jun 6, 2007 - 15 comments

Mr Monkey's World of Hats! [Via.]
posted by homunculus on Dec 31, 2006 - 7 comments

Apes of Wrath In October, they gained similar rights to humans, now it seems monkeys are plotting to take over the earth. Their bid for global domination has been happening right before our eyes; it's just a matter of connecting the dots. Check out this ominous timeline of escalating monkey aggression, drawn from real news reports. The evolution will not be televised.
posted by P-Soque on Nov 8, 2006 - 14 comments

We're Schleswig-Holsteins, darling. (Ah, from the Low Countries.) Cows have accents. Some other animals with accents: birds, otters, frogs, monkeys.
posted by pracowity on Aug 25, 2006 - 13 comments

For those who worry that the concrete pillars around U.S. Federal buildings aren't strong enough to stop a motivated car bomber in an 18 wheeler, this video should comfort you. Similarly, for those of you who are worried that the concrete shielding around our weapons bunkers is not thick enough, this video should put you at ease. And finally, for those of you that worry that dogs & monkeys are putting aside their differences to team up against mankind, this video should lay that myth to rest.
posted by jonson on Aug 10, 2006 - 38 comments

Portraits of Stuffed Monkeys.
posted by brain_drain on Jul 27, 2006 - 9 comments

This painting will not set you agog until you realize it's an early design for a self-righting ship by a man somewhat obsessed. Similarly, this cap pattern is pretty simple, but it represents some deep geek knowledge. In other words, digital artisans can seem pretentiously empty under the physical weight of a carefully considered compulsion.
posted by If I Had An Anus on Jun 6, 2006 - 19 comments

AIDS really did come from chimps in the 1950s --..."We're 25 years into this pandemic," Hahn said. "We don't have a cure. We don't have a vaccine. But we know where it came from. At least we can make a check mark on one of those." ... ...Identifying the source of the HIV pandemic is more than filling in a missing link in the disease's progression. ...
posted by amberglow on May 25, 2006 - 25 comments

"And And God created man, for because I have blessed him. And Noah begat Methuselah three wives of it, and to thee nothing but dust shalt say, This is evil continually." What happens when you put a million monkeys at a million typewriters? You get the Markov Bible! After a million years, that is.
posted by tweak on May 18, 2006 - 17 comments

The meaning of life.
posted by bobbyelliott on Apr 23, 2006 - 103 comments

Bonobo's Bongos (note: Shockwave)
posted by crunchland on Apr 9, 2006 - 19 comments

Monk-e-mail If you want to send a message, this is....unique.
posted by konolia on Feb 17, 2006 - 47 comments

Have yourself an Ugly Little Christmas! Cause nuttin' says Christmas like Juggling Monkeys.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy on Dec 24, 2005 - 8 comments

"I bet you look good on the dancefloor" is the new single by a hitherto unknown Sheffield band called the Arctic Monkeys. [warning direct QT link] Media hype has meant demand for their London gig is so high they have moved from playing a pub to playing the London Astoria. Their observations on northern culture have drawn comparisons with Oasis and Kaiser Chiefs - or will they go the way of other bands picked up then dumped by the media? (anyone remember Gay Dad?) Whether or not they last, you will probably be hearing them quite a lot in the next few months.
posted by greycap on Oct 1, 2005 - 46 comments

The experimental wake-up drug CX717 is the the talk of the internets. But who needs it when Modafinil (aka Provigil, aka Alertec) has been available by prescription since 2001? And if you don't want to get a prescription, there's always Adrafinil, its metabolic precursor, which is marketed as a "supplement". After all, caffeine is, like, soooo last century.
posted by exhilaration on Aug 23, 2005 - 24 comments

Helper monkeys! Severely disabled people can get trained monkeys to help them out in their daily chores, though sometime this causes problems. Haven't you always wanted a monkey? The Mesa SWAT Team certainly want one.
posted by Kattullus on Jun 17, 2005 - 23 comments

Dog-riding monkeys in professional rodeo. Only in America can a guy like this or this character make a living by having monkeys ride dogs in rodeos (Realvideo). Now they've gotten news coverage in the past, but what I would give for them to come to my part of the world. And more photos please! Wow. Sometimes I love this country.
posted by AspectRatio on May 10, 2005 - 8 comments

This monkey business has finally gone too far [warning: cackling].
posted by thedevildancedlightly on Apr 13, 2005 - 17 comments

Hey Summers: Male [monkeys] more susceptible to age-related cognitive decline.
"Gay men adopt male and female strategies. Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic".
Exotic animals on the menu: Bush/Meat ‘05.
posted by mcgraw on Mar 2, 2005 - 29 comments

A gallery of gorilla (and ape, and chimp, and monkey, and bonobo) comic book covers via Neil Gaiman's blog
posted by Capn on Feb 22, 2005 - 14 comments

Sure, monkeys are willing to pay for pr0n, but will the robots?
posted by mcgraw on Feb 2, 2005 - 20 comments

Ballerina. Vulcan. French. it's a rainbow of sock monkey flavors that I never knew existed. (via Slumbering Lungfish)
posted by PinkStainlessTail on Dec 29, 2004 - 5 comments

A new species of monkey turned up in India [NYTimes or Rediff]. Though the monkeys are new to science, people in the area are quite familiar with them. They call them "mun zala" or deep forest monkeys. It's a stocky, short-tailed, brown-haired creature they have named the Macaca munzala, or Arunachal macaque. Maybe not that excting for those of us not excited by, uh, mokeys, but did you know this year there have been other new things discovered? A new species of plec and one of Neon goby, even more exciting, a new electric fish was found as well. A quick search turned up dozens of new fish this year. ABC News says 178 new things found in the oceans this year alone, raising the number of life-forms found in the world's oceans to about 230,000. The big question is, of course, how many of those will Taste Like Chicken? The bad news on the little critter front is 1 in 10 bird species could vanish within 100 years, and I bet they all taste like chicken.
posted by Blake on Dec 16, 2004 - 16 comments

Adopt an Ex-Lab Experiment Monkey
The BUAV (British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection) is sponsoring an adoption program to help care for some 50 macaques that had been owned by a lab in Thailand to be used for scientific experiments. After some publicity, they were pressured into releasing the little monkeys just prior to their last experiment that would have killed them all.
posted by fenriq on Nov 16, 2004 - 33 comments

Six foot tall ferocious lion killing species of ape discovered in jungles of the Congo. Or they could be giant chimpanzees. Or half-breeds. The discovery has baffled scientists.
posted by stbalbach on Oct 9, 2004 - 30 comments

For the second time in as many years, the rhesus monkeys have escape from the Tulane University National Primate Research Center.
posted by Katemonkey on Aug 10, 2004 - 19 comments

Is it a gargoyle? No, it is the heartwarming, sly, naughty long-tailed Macaque monkey of Bali, creature of myth and of the Sacred Forest. It may think it's a gargoyle, or perhaps it's only dreaming of Notre Dame
posted by Shane on Jul 16, 2004 - 6 comments

Brain implants 'read' monkey minds. (No, not that monkey mind.) A group of CalTech neuroscientists have been able to predict the actions of monkeys by observing neural activity in the parietal and premotor cortices related to planning and motivation (PDF.) Other research previously allowed monkeys to control a robotic arm with their minds; this observed the higher-level goal and value signals, and could lead to more natural thought-activated prosthetic devices for people with paralysis. [Via MonkeyFilter.]
posted by homunculus on Jul 10, 2004 - 29 comments

I'll raise you 5 bananas. What do Primate Programmers do in their off hours? Using David Sklansky's theorys to play Texas Hold'em online. As a poker-playing, programming, primate myself, I can relate.
posted by bashos_frog on May 22, 2004 - 2 comments