Can Animals Count?

Can Animals Be Moral?

1. Grace of the Virtues Eleanor, the matriarch of her family, is dying and unable to stand. Grace manages to lift her to her feet. She tries to get Eleanor to walk, pushing her gently along. But Eleanor falls again. Grace appears very distressed, and shrieks loudly. She persists in trying to get Eleanor to stand, unsuccessfully. Grace stays by the fallen figure of Eleanor for another hour, whil...

Ownership You Can Count On

While many forms of memory management have been proposed, the only ones to achieve widespread adoption have been explicit deallocation and garbage collection. This leaves programmers requiring explicit control of memory behavior unable to obtain the software engineering and security benefits of programming in a safe language. We present a new approach to memory management called alias counting ...

Can Animals be Moral Agents?

This experiment confi rms and extends an earlier finding that a hungry rhesus monkey (0) will avoid securing food if this subjects another mon key (SA) to electric shock. In the present series this "sacrificial" behavior was manifested in 6 of 10 animals independently of the relative position of the two animals in a dominance hierarchy. It was also found that while prior shock of the 0 resulted...

Can We Count on Global Health Estimates?

This week PLoS Medicine publishes a cluster of articles discussing the current state of global health estimates and debating the way into the future [1–5]. Estimates of global health indicators— which give insight into death and disease rates, document advances in health and development, and help policymakers monitor progress—are a necessary evil. They are absolutely essential to improving glob...

Seismology Can animals predict earthquakes The Economist