The Mystery of the Monkeys on the Rock

When you think of monkeys, you probably think of the Tropics. Few species of monkeys venture into temperate lands. Nevertheless, there are one or two notable exceptions.

In the high Atlas Mountains of North Africa, where snowfall is common during the winter, small groups of Barbary apes roam through forests of cedar and oak. One isolated group of these monkeys can be found 200 miles [300 km] to the north, marooned on the Rock of Gibraltar, at the southernmost tip of Europe.

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The Early History of Balloon Flight

Joseph Michel and Jacques Étienne Montgolfier, sons of a wealthy paper manufacturer of Annonay, France, are honored in history for building and launching the first hot-air balloon. Their initial experiments during the early 1780’s involved paper balloons, which they believed were made to rise because of the smoke from burning straw and wool. Before long, they realized that it was the heated air that created the lift.

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The Terrible Price

This meteoric rise in popularity, however, was not without its rumblings of foreboding. In fact, as far back as some 19 centuries ago, the Roman historian Pliny had noted that slaves who worked in asbestos mines seemed to have respiratory problems. His was only the first of many warning voices.

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Social Skills in Infants?

Babies as young as six months develop “social judging skills before they [can] talk,” say researchers at Yale University, U.S.A. Babies aged six months to ten months watched a large-eyed toy try to climb hills, while other toys either helped it or pushed it backward. The children were then “presented with the toys to see which they would play with,” explains the Houston Chronicle.

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Doomsday Clock Advances

The doomsday clock, conceived by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) to illustrate how close mankind is to nuclear disaster, has been advanced two minutes, to read five minutes before midnight—the “figurative end of civilization.” The clock has only been reset 18 times in its 60-year history.

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Prescription for Danger

“Medicines claimed more lives in Germany last year than traffic accidents did,” reported the newspaper Stuttgarter Nachrichten. Reportedly, some 25,000 people died in 1998 from wrongly prescribed drugs. This is three times as many as were killed in traffic accidents during the same period. Self-medication is said to play only a secondary role. The main problem seems to be a lack of information and training among doctors about the medicines and their effects. Pharmacologist Ingolf Cascorbi said that according to one estimate, “in Germany each year, 10,000 deaths and 250,000 cases of persons suffering from serious side effects could be avoided if research and training were optimized,” states the report.

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