The first advertising campaign for non-human primates

Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner had an epiphany last year. At a TED talk, the two New York advertising executives learned that captive monkeys understand money, and that when faced with economic games they will behave in similar ways to humans. So if they can cope with money, how would they respond to advertising?

Laurie Santos, the Yale University primatologist who gave the TED talk, studies monkeys as a way of exploring the evolution of the human mind. A partnership was soon born between Santos, and Olwell and Kiehner's company Proton. The resulting monkey ad campaign was unveiled on Saturday at the Cannes Lions Festival, the creative festival for the advertising industry.

Monkey brands

The objective, says Olwell, is to see if advertising can make brown capuchins change their behaviour. The team will create two brands of food – the team is considering making two colours of jello – specifically targeted at brown capuchins, one supported by an ad campaign and the other not.

How do you advertise to monkeys? Easy: create a billboard campaign that hangs outside the monkeys' enclosure.

"The foods will be novel to them and are equally delicious," Olwell says. Brand A will be advertised and brand B will not. After a period of exposure to the campaign, the monkeys will be offered a choice of both brands.

Santos plans to kick off the experimental campaign in the coming weeks. "If they tend toward one and not the other we'll be witnessing preference shifting due to our advertising," Olwell says.

Sex sells

Olwell says that developing a campaign for non-humans threw up some special challenges. "They do not have language or culture and they have very short attention spans," he says. "We really had to strip out any hip and current thinking and get to the absolute core of what is advertising.

"We're used to doing fairly complex and nuanced work. For this exploration we had to constantly ask ourselves, 'Could we be less finessed?'. We wanted the most visceral approaches."

New Scientist has seen the resulting two billboards. We are unable to show them until Santos and her team have completed their study, but we can reveal that its message is most certainly visceral.

One billboard shows a graphic shot of a female monkey with her genitals exposed, alongside the brand A logo. The other shows the alpha male of the capuchin troop associated with brand A.

Olwell expects brand A to be the capuchins' favoured product. "Monkeys have been shown in previous studies to really love photographs of alpha males and shots of genitals, and we think this will drive their purchasing habits."

The team wanted shots for the campaign that were as natural as possible. "After we settled on what they were being sold and that we were going to be doing 'sex sells', we really wanted to make a very direct ad. We wanted to shoot our subjects involved in normal day-to-day life."

Source New Scientist

Biologists discover how yeast cells reverse aging

The gene they found can double yeast lifespan when turned on late in life.

A whole yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) cell viewed by X-ray microscopy. Inside, the nucleus and a large vacuole (red) are visible. 

Human cells have a finite lifespan: They can only divide a certain number of times before they die. However, that lifespan is reset when reproductive cells are formed, which is why the children of a 20-year-old man have the same life expectancy as those of an 80-year-old man.

How that resetting occurs in human cells is not known, but MIT biologists have now found a gene that appears to control this process in yeast. Furthermore, by turning on that gene in aged yeast cells, they were able to double their usual lifespan.

If the human cell lifespan is controlled in a similar way, it could offer a new approach to rejuvenating human cells or creating pluripotent stem cells, says Angelika Amon, professor of biology and senior author of a paper describing the work in the June 24 issue of the journal Science.

“If we can identify which genes reverse aging, we can start engineering ways to express them in normal cells,” says Amon, who is also a member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Lead author of the paper is Koch Institute postdoc Elçin Ünal.

Rejuvenation

Scientists already knew that aged yeast cells look different from younger cells. (Yeast have a normal lifespan of about 30 cell divisions.) Those age-related changes include accumulation of extra pieces of DNA, clumping of cellular proteins and abnormal structures of the nucleolus (a cluster of proteins and nucleic acids found in the cell nucleus that produce all other proteins in the cell).

However, they weren’t sure which of these physical markers were actually important to the aging process. “Nobody really knows what aging is,” Amon says. “We know all these things happen, but we don’t know what will eventually kill a cell or make it sick.”

When yeast cells reproduce, they undergo a special type of cell division called meiosis, which produces spores. The MIT team found that the signs of cellular aging disappear at the very end of meiosis. “There’s a true rejuvenation going on,” Amon says.

The researchers discovered that a gene called NDT80 is activated at the same time that the rejuvenation occurs. When they turned on this gene in aged cells that were not reproducing, the cells lived twice as long as normal.

“It took an old cell and made it young again,” Amon says.

In aged cells with activated NDT80, the nucleolar damage was the only age-related change that disappeared. That suggests that nucleolar changes are the primary force behind the aging process, Amon says.

The next challenge, says Daniel Gottschling, a member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, will be to figure out the cellular mechanisms driving those changes. “Something is going on that we don’t know about,” says Gottschling, who was not involved in this research. “It opens up some new biology, in terms of how lifespan is being reset.”

The protein produced by the NDT80 gene is a transcription factor, meaning that it activates other genes. The MIT researchers are now looking for the genes targeted by NDT80, which likely carry out the rejuvenation process.

Amon and her colleagues are also planning to study NDT80’s effects in the worm C. elegans, and may also investigate the effects of the analogous gene in mice, p63. Humans also have the p63 gene, a close relative of the cancer-protective gene p53 found in the cells that make sperm and eggs. 

Source MIT

Humans Guided Evolution of Dog Barks

It’s a question that tends to arise when a neighborhood mutt sees a cat at 3 a.m., or if you live in an apartment above someone who leaves their small, yapping dog alone all day: Why do dogs bark so much?
Perhaps because humans designed them that way.

“The direct or indirect human artificial selection process made the dog bark as we know,” said Csaba Molnar, formerly an ethologist at Hungary’s Eotvos Lorand University.
Molnar’s work was inspired by a simple but intriguing fact: Barking is common in domesticated dogs, but infrequent if not downright absent in their wild counterparts. Wild dogs yip and squeal and whine, but rarely produce the repetitive acoustic percussion that is barking. Many people had made that observation, but Molnar and his colleagues were the first to rigorously investigate it.

Because anatomical differences between wild and domestic dogs don’t explain the barking gap, Molnar hypothesized a link to their one great difference: Domesticated dogs have spent the last 50,000 years in human company, being intensively bred to fit our requirements.
Evolution over such a relatively short time is difficult to pin down, but Molnar reasoned that if his hypothesis were correct, two facts would need to be true: Barks should contain information about dogs’ internal states or external environment, and humans should be able to interpret them.
To people who know dogs well, this might seem self-evident. But not every intuition is true. As Molnar’s research would show, sheepherders — people understandably certain in their ability to recognize their own own dogs’ voices — actually couldn’t distinguish their dogs’ barks from others.

Molnar tested his propositions in a series of experiments described in various journal papers between 2005 and 2010. The most high-profile, published in 2008 in the journal Animal Cognition, described using a computer program to classify dog barks (.pdf).
At the time, many journalists — including this one — glibly interpreted the study as a halting step towards dog-to-human translation, but its significance was deeper. Molnar’s statistical algorithm showed that dog barks displayed common patterns of acoustic structure. In terms of pitch and repetition and harmonics, one dog’s alarm bark fundamentally resembled another dog’s alarm bark, and so on.
Intriguingly, the algorithm showed the most between-individual variation in barks made by dogs at play. According to Molnar, this is a hint of human pressure at work. People traditionally needed to identify alarm sounds quickly, but sounds of play were relatively unimportant.
By recording barks in various situations — confronting a stranger, at play, and so on — and playing them back to humans, Molnar’s group then showed that people could reliably identify the context in which barks were made. In short, we understand them.

The findings support Molnar’s original hypothesis, though more work is needed. Molnar started to cross-reference a phylogenetic tree of dog breeds with their barking habits, looking for an evolutionary trajectory, but never finished. He had been a student, and his thesis was complete. Unable to get more funding, he’s now a science journalist.
According to Eugene Morton, a zoologist and animal communication expert at the National Zoo, Molnar’s ideas are quite plausible. Morton noted that barking is a very useful type of sound, simple and capable of carrying over long distances. However, it could have been a side effect of humans favoring other, domestication-friendly traits in the wolves from which modern dogs descended.
“Barks are used by juvenile wolves, by pups. It’s neotenic — something derived from a juvenile stage, and kept in adults. That’s probably what we selected for,” said Morton. “We don’t want dogs who are dominant over us. The bark might go along with that breeding for juvenile behavior. Or it could have come with something else we selected, such as a lack of aggression.”

Molnar’s research is now a fascinating footnote waiting to be pushed forward by other researchers. In addition to that phylogenetic tree of barking, Molnar would like to see analyses of relationships between breeds’ bark characteristics and their traditional roles. If, as with the deep frightening rumble of mastiff guards, breeds’ barks tend to fit their jobs, it would further support the notion of human-guided bark evolution.
The ultimate evidence, said Molnar, would be if human knowledge of bark structure could be used to synthesize barks. “If these barks, played to dogs and humans, had the same effects, it would be awesome,” he said.

Source Wired