Word: hyena
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...comedy jungle, where Robin Williams is a big silverback ape and Jon Stewart a sneaky hyena, Flight of the Conchords are tiny fawns. Their whimsical acoustic-guitar songs and gentle banter totter out on spindly legs to nibble at funny bones. The duo, who claim to be the "fourth most popular folk parodists in New Zealand," sing about the usual stuff--mistaken identity, killer robots, racist dragons--but with an earnest, blinking naiveté. It's a hemisphere away from the witty social commentary that reigns on America's comedy circuit. "I guess we're kind of nerdy hipsters," says Bret...
...fasten-your-seat-belt sign is ON,” shrieked the frazzled flight attendant as she chased me down the carpeted aisle. “I’m sorry,” I stammered, feeling like a frail gazelle in the clutches of a rabid hyena, “but I’ve been drinking coffee all day and we’ve been flying for two hours...
...will signal play and then try to fight or mate with others, but if they do that enough, they can't get other animals to play." Does that behavior rise to the level of ethics or morality? If morality is simply living by the rules of a society, says hyena expert Christine Drea of Duke University, then yes, animals do that. But just because animals have rules and bad things can happen when those aren't followed, she says, "doesn't mean they're ethical creatures...
...email, Hauser’s fellow Science B-29 Professor Richard W. Wrangham contributed the adaptationist’s point of view. Citing his own research on genital masculinization in spotted hyenas, Wrangham explained that the hypothesis long trumpeted by Gould, which claims that the hyena’s genitals are a non-adaptive by-product of high androgen levels, is wrong. “It’s an unusual case, but it seems to me an important symbol—first of the supposed correctness of the anti-adaptationist perspective, and now of the fact that simplistic thinking...
...camp," she wrote her family from Kenya. "All around the crickets are singing their nightly chorus--and so many different types of song, it is hard to imagine...An owl is hooting about a half-mile down the gorge, and before supper we heard the weird call of the hyena--which means His Lordship the Lion is around somewhere...At the moment I must stop, and after sitting up here, quite alone with the wind, the moon, the stars, the whole immense vastness of Africa and the Serengeti with the mysterious universe all around and very real, creep into...