Crows may knock the great apes down a peg.

As some of you may know, it was shown recently that magpies are self-aware (this was done using the mirror test). This put the bird amongst the small group of animals that fall into this category: "great apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, humans), bottlenose dolphins, Orcas, elephants, and European Magpies" (stolen from Wikipedia).

Now crows, a relative of magpies in the corvids family ("a group that includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays and magpies" (BBC)), are making a run for the title of smartest animal around. Check out this article by the BBC that discusses tool use and other evidence of meaningful thought within New Caladonian crow communities. If you look at nothing else, check out the first video, in which a crow picks up a straight length of wire, bends it to create a hook on one end, and then uses this newly created tool to reach a bucket of treats at the bottom of a small shaft.

And if you are still interested in finding out more about crows check out this TED talk on the subject of useful things we may be able to train crows to do.

Anyone looking for a new hobby?

A few nights ago Carly, Katie, and I had a group Wiki-diving session that ended up using up about forty-five minutes of our time and required three different types of searches (Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google Products). I’ll introduce the topic here the same way in which we learned about it: a video of some guy in a park playing with a clear ball.

The Wiki-diving actually began as an argument about whether the guy in the video was holding a real ball or a digitally created image of a ball that was added at a later time. This led us, naturally, to Wikipedia, where we found out that, “Contact juggling is a form of object manipulation that focuses on the movement of objects such as balls in permanent contact with the body. Having little in common with ‘toss’ juggling, it most typically involves the rolling of one or more completely transparent balls on the hands and arms to create visual illusions, such as that of a ball fixed in space” (Contact juggling). Who knew?

A few related links that we enjoyed:

• Contact juggling balls for sale (it turns out that this is a fairly cheap hobby);
• Michael Moschen, the founder of the activity;
• Michael Moschen’s TED talk;
• ”Contact Juggling: Day 114”.

Since we watched nearly all of Moschen’s very strange TED talk Katie determined that the three of us are TED addicts and may need professional help.