Bizarre

Only monkeys and dolphins among all inhabitants on our planet are comparable in terms of their brain development to man. A group of researchers led by Oksana Vasilieva from the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, Moscow, assesses adaptation capabilities of monkeys in various stress situations that are likely to occur during space flights. The experiments involve only rhesus monkeys, which are not so close to man as anthropoid apes, and therefore are considered less smart. The monkey is an inquisitive animal, especially when it is young. Placed before a monitor protected with a transparent plastic cover it starts moving the joystick aimlessly. Themovements make an image appear on the screen.

Sooner or later the cursor hits a certain spot that triggers a whistling sound followed by a dragee dropping into a tray placed near the joystick. The dragee smells banana. The monkey puts the delicious thing in the mouth. The reinforcer makes the monkey seek conditions that have led to it and repeat the rewarding movements of the cursor . In this manner, conditioning is created, which lasts as long as it brings about joy or relief from pain. The conditioned response is needed for adaptation to changing existence conditions or environment. "Here we deal with an instrumental response rather than with the classical conditioned response discovered by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov and associatedwith psychic salivation occurring when food is in sight", says Olga Vasilieva. "For example, a dog is rewarded with a piece of sugar for dancing. It this way it learns to do things. Everything what a dog or any other animal does is an instrument to get a reward."Teaching monkeys to play computer games develops instrumental conditioning. The lucky hit suggests to the tested monkey that the image on the screen be somehow linked with a banana dragee, therefore it seeks to attain the reinforcer through purposeful manipulations. Then a simple task of placing the cursor on a motionless blue frame, which repeats the shape of the screen, gives way to more sophisticated jobs. By turns, the frame loses its top, bottom , left and right sides. ...

2008 had its share of strange and unusual stories. Weird news covered the world of science, the animal kingdom and technology.Some were real, and some turned out to be hoaxes. Here's a look at the Top 10 as compiled by "Time magazine.

No. 10: Man auctions his life on eBay: After being left broken-hearted when his wife of 5 years left him, Ian Usher, 44, put his entire life up for sale on eBay in June. The one-week auction included his three-bedroom house in Perth, Western Australia, worth approximately $400,000, a trial for his job at a rug store, his car, motorcycle,clothes and even friends.

He had hoped to raise up to $500,000, but ended up with almost $384,000.

No. 9 - Bigfoot spotted ... really? In August, two members of an organization called Searching For Bigfoot, Inc. said they would present evidence that Bigfoot's body had been found, but a week later an independent investigator concluded it was all a lie and the two men were fled as they were being investigated for fraud.

No. 8 - Ice cream made from breast milk. The advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) wrote an open letter to the Ben & Jerry's ice cream company in September, urging them to swap the cow's milk in their products for human breast milk. The group was trying to highlight the plight of calvesand cows. Ben & Jerry's didn't take them up on their suggestion.

No. 7 - New fish food - human feet. The practice of using tiny carp called garra rufa to deliver a pedicure spread from Asia to the United States after John Ho, a Virginia salon owner, announced he had offered the treatment to 5,000 customers over a four-month period beginning in July. Soon, pedicurists all over the country were ordering thousands of the fish, which are said to help soften the skin in advance of normal, human-administered pedicures, but salon owners and customers in Washington and Texas were out of luck as the practice was quickly banned on sanitary grounds.

No. 6 - Virutal world cheating leads to real-life divorce. A British couple divorced in November after shecoug......

A very mysterious circle shaped like a bull's-eye has been evolving on Jack Ledbetter's property for the past three years, and so far neither he nor anyone who has come to examine it can give any definitive explanation for it. "To me it's strange, and I would like to have an answer," the perplexed retiree said. The circle is about 20 feet wide, and there is a 10-inch hole in its center. "A lot of people say it's from rotted stumps," Ledbetter said. The problem he has with that theory is that no one as far back as living memory goes remembers any trees growing in that area. Ledbetter and wifeMary have lived on the four-acre spread for 38 years, and it's been in the family for generations.

According to Ledbetter, relatives and friends stand and shake their heads at it. "It's sort of a family joke that it could be from aliens," said daughter-in-law Nema Ledbetter. "Some think it's a sinkhole or even Indian burial ground. I call it a mystery." Its bull's-eye shape resembles some of the highly publicized crop circles worldwide that continue to mystify much of the scientific community. What is doesn't share with the vast majority of these intriguing phenomena is that it appeared in grass, not wheat or corn as most of the others have done.Moreover, the crop circles don'tdevelop over a lengthy period of time like Ledbetter's has done. Even the very large ones generally take only about four hours to manifest themselves, according to data gleaned from a documentary on the Discovery Channel.Three years ago, Ledbetter happened to step in a hole he hadn't previously detected.The next thing he noticed was a distinctive fading of the surrounding grass's color."This year it turned completely dark," he said.It has been suggested to Ledbetter that underground water could be the cause of it. Perhaps that's not far-fetched. Some scientists who are always trying to analyze the crop circles so prevalent on Milk Hill in Wiltshire, England, have postulated that an underground aquifermight. ...

Determined digging by badgers living near Stonehenge, a 5000-year old circle of megaliths in southern England, is damaging ancient archaeological artefacts and human remains. The shy nocturnal animals are burrowing into prehistoric burial mounds on Salisbury Plain and and have already disturbed remains and artefacts buried a few feet beneath the surface. The badgers' homebuilding at the World Heritage site has become so serious that the Ministry of Defence, which owns much of the land in the area, is trying to coax them away to less historically sensitive places. "We have already moved badgers from two monuments located justnorth of Stonehenge," said Ian Barnes, one of four archaeologists employed by the Ministry of Defence.

Barnes said Neolithic long barrows, burial mounds that date back to 3500 BC, are most vulnerable to attack, with about half of the 20 sites showing signs of badger activity. Long barrows are elongated, roughly rectangular structures that can be more than 30 metres long and several feet high. Easy work for keen diggers The characteristic chalk and soft earth of the area is easy work for badgers, who are proficient diggers. The creatures have a distinctive black and white stripped head and often have more than one underground home, or sett. Barnes said some monuments will have to be given up to the badgers because the damagethey have caused is already too extensive. There has been talk of culling the animals but English Heritage, the government's advisor on the historic environment that looks after Stonehenge, said it was not an option. "Culling badgers has not been considered by English Heritage and is not our policy," a spokesperson said."We have recently begun work on a project to assess in more detail the impact of the badgers on Salisbury Plain archaeological sites. "We will be continuing to work on this project over the course of the [Northern Hemisphere] summer of 2004 and hope the results will help us understand more about the nature of badger damage so we can protect England's archaeology as effectively as possiblefor. ...