Word: planck
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, began exploring the verbal gifts of dogs when she saw a television show about a border collie named Rico--an animal that to all appearances could fetch dozens of different objects in response to their names. Kaminski put Rico to a rigorous test and confirmed that the dog could learn names for more than 200 toys, balls and other items. "I think Rico is a highly talented dog," says Kaminski, "but we've also found new dogs that do what Rico...
Going to the Dogs Some scientists acquired their fascination with dogs directly, but Hare's grew out of his research on chimpanzee cognition in the late 1990s, when he was part of a team of primatologists led by Michael Tomasello, now at Max Planck. A chimp can follow the gaze of other chimps and figure out what they can and cannot see. That's a skill that seems to be limited to great apes and humans. Tomasello and his team wondered if such a rare ability extended to hand gestures and tested chimps to see if they could understand pointing...
...ordinary water, but it's salt water, with sodium turning up in the samples no matter how many times the ring material was retested. "Our measurements imply that besides table salt, the grains also contain carbonates like soda," says Frank Postberg, a Cassini scientist working at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. (See a photo-essay of the world's most competitive space programs...
...Planck will also attempt an extraordinary mathematical feat: calculating the total number of atoms in the universe. With that information, it can infer the total density of the mysterious quantity known as dark matter. "We're looking at the physics at the very beginning of the physical universe," says ESA director of science David Southwood...
...will be two months before Planck and Herschel reach their final destination, a gravitational "sweet spot" known as the Lagrange Point 2, where they can stay fixed in the same location relative to the earth and sun. Once there, they will need trillions of samples and bits of raw data before they can start generating their sky maps. But even if they deliver a fraction of the results that the eggheads on Earth are promising, the pictures should still be out of this world...