Mandrill monkey makes 'pedicuring' tool, By Victoria Gill

This crude pedicure is an example of deliberate tool manufacture and use

A crude "pedicure" carried out by a mandrill at Chester Zoo suggests the monkeys are capable of more advanced tool use than previously thought.

Scientists from Durham University, UK, filmed the mandrill stripping a twig and using the resulting tool to clean under its toenails.
They published the findings in the journal Behavioural Processes.
Mandrills are the fifth species of Old World monkey seen deliberately modifying tools.
Non-human apes, including chimpanzees and orangutans, can adapt basic tools for specific jobs.
One well-known example of this behaviour is termite fishing in chimpanzees, where the animals strip down grasses to make fishing rods that they then poke into termite mounds to snag the nutritious insects.

"It is an ability that, up until a few years ago, was thought to be unique to humans," said Dr Riccardo Pansini, who led the research.

The new findings, he said, indicate that monkeys' intelligence may too have been underestimated.
"The gap between monkeys and great apes is not as large as we thought it was in terms of tool use and modification," he told BBC Nature.
Dr Pansini captured the footage while studying stress-related behaviour in the zoo's mandrills.
His research during that time helped inform the design of a specially landscaped enclosure, which contained shrubs to give the animals hiding places. The design won an animal welfare award in 2007.
In the footage that Dr Pansini captured, a large male mandrill strips down a twig, apparently to make it narrower. The animal then uses the modified stick to scrape dirt from underneath its toenails.
Though the scientist was excited to witness this deliberate tool modification, he said it was not entirely surprising.
"Mandrills have been seen to clean their ears with modified tools in the wild," he told BBC Nature. "This was thought to help prevent ear infections and therefore might be an important behaviour in terms of hygiene."
He thinks the captive setting may have helped bring out this behaviour.
"Animals have more time in captivity to carry out tasks that are not focused on looking for food or mating," he said. "So in zoos, you can occasionally pick up behaviours that are a little bit strange.

 

Mandrills are the fifth species of Old World monkey seen to modify tools

"In the wild this 'pedicuring' would be considered trivial," he explained. "But cleaning their ears with the same modified tool probably gave the animals some relief from the pain in their ears.
"So we're witnessing the same behaviour that's used in quite important tasks being adapted for a less important task," Dr Pansini said.
Dr Amanda Seed, an expert in primate tool-use from the University of St Andrews, UK, praised the researchers for capturing such interesting footage.
She added, though, that it was not entirely clear that the mandrill was deliberately modifying the stick for the specific goal of producing a "sharpened toenail-cleaning tool".
She told BBC Nature: "For me, the behaviour is closer to what we already know from other species, using a stick for self-cleaning purposes, than the tool modification of say chimpanzees - which rake their stick tools through their teeth to produce a brush for gathering termites.
"But these definitions are always tricky. You could say that as soon as an animal pulls a branch from a tree, they're modifying that branch."
Dr Sonya Hill a research officer at Chester Zoo, added that research findings from zoos could have a "direct impact on evidence-based conservation and husbandry practices".
"They can also contribute to a wider body of scientific knowledge, as this mandrill study has shown."

 

The enclosure the researchers helped design earned the zoo an award

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Space shuttle Atlantis makes final landing" By Jonathan Amos

The vehicle swept into the Kennedy Space Center, its wheels touching the runway just before local sunrise.
Nasa's shuttles were instrumental in building the space station, and were used to maintain the Hubble telescope.
"The space shuttle changed the way we view the world and it changed the way we view the Universe," said commander Chris Ferguson on landing.
"There's a lot of emotion today but one thing's indisputable: America's not going to stop exploring," he radioed to mission control.
Retirement of Nasa's iconic shuttle fleet was ordered by the US government, in part due to the high cost of maintaining the ships.
The decision leaves the country with no means of putting astronauts in orbit.

 

The Atlantis crew became known as "the final four"

The US space agency's intention is to invite the private sector to provide it with space transport services, and a number of commercial ventures already have crew ships in development.
These are unlikely to be ready to fly for at least three or four years, however.
In the interim, Nasa will rely on the Russians to ferry its people to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
Despite the dark skies over Florida's Space Coast, large crowds came out to try to glimpse Atlantis as it made its historic return from orbit. Two thousand people were gathered at Kennedy's landing strip itself, but even in at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, where mission control is sited, they came in huge numbers.
The de-orbit track brought Atlantis across central Florida and the Titusville-Mims area before a hard bank to the left put the vehicle on a line to Runway 15 at Kennedy.

A remarkable view of Atlantis captured by astronauts on the space station. The shuttle’s plasma trail appears as a bean sprout against clouds and city lights

Commander Ferguson, a veteran of two previous shuttle missions was at the controls, with his pilot Doug Hurley alongside him. Mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim were sitting directly behind on the flightdeck.
Their ship's rear wheels touched the ground at 0556 local time (0956 GMT; 1056 BST), and the vehicle was stationary under a minute later.

Andy Gallacher BBC News, Kennedy Space Center

A huge cheer went up across the Kennedy Space Centre as the space shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time just before dawn.
Many here believe this is the end of an era and the end, for now, of America's dominance in space.
It is a bitter-sweet moment. Nasa plans to celebrate the shuttle programme's countless milestones over the next few days but on Friday thousands of workers will lose their jobs.
For now, though, this is a chance for everyone involved in the 30-year programme to reflect on what the world's first re-usable spacecraft has achieved.
Over the decades, the orbiters deployed almost 200 satellites, carried out important scientific research and built the International Space Station.
A chapter in human space exploration has now closed for good, but the space shuttles' place in history is assured.

It concluded a 13-day re-supply mission to the ISS.

The return of Atlantis marked a moment of high emotion for the Space Coast - not least because it will trigger a big lay-off of contractor staff. More than 3,000 people involved in shuttle operations lose their jobs this week.
Mindful of this, Nasa Administrator and former astronaut Charles Bolden was quick to thank programme staff in the speeches that followed the landing.
"I want everybody who was involved in this to feel incredibly proud of what you did and what your role was," he said.
"Like me, [the crew of Atlantis] got to do the flying but we owe an incredible debt of gratitude to the thousands, literally tens of thousands, of folks all around the country who made all this possible."
The orbiter programme does not officially end for a month, but even then it is likely to take a couple of years to close all activities, such as the archiving of decades of shuttle engineering data.
For Atlantis, its retirement will be spent as a static display at the Kennedy visitor complex.
The Discovery and Endeavour shuttles, which made their final flights earlier this year, will go to the Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia and the California Science Center in Los Angeles, respectively.

Commander Chris Ferguson: 'Flying in space is a real dream'

Nasa hopes to invest money saved from shuttle operations in a new spaceship and rocket that can take humans beyond the ISS to destinations such as the Moon, asteroids and Mars.
The conical ship, known as Orion, has already been defined and is in an advanced stage of development. The rocket, on the other hand, is still an unknown quantity.
The US Congress has told the agency what its minimum capabilities should be. However, the agency is currently struggling to put those specifications into a concept it says can be built to the timeline and budget specified by the politicians.

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Two Britons arrested in Afghanistan

Two Britons have been arrested in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has said.

The MoD said a male and a female had been detained in a joint operation between local forces and UK troops.
Some reports say they were arrested in Helmand province, but an Afghan source told the BBC they were arrested at a hotel in Herat.
The Britons are currently being held in a secure facility in Kandahar for questioning.
Nato forces in Afghanistan usually hold suspects for up to 96 hours before they are freed or sent to local authorities.
However, this can be extended in certain cases.
BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera said: "The two Britons picked up in Herat in recent days are believed to have gone to Afghanistan from the UK.
"They may have been under suspicion here and it's thought they had gone out to Afghanistan probably to make contacts."
He said they may have met people, potentially militants, with a view towards training and then carrying out some kind of attack back in the UK - but that is not certain.
And the BBC's Bilal Sarwary, in Kabul, quoted an Afghan intelligence official in Herat as saying: "Our agents played a key role in the arrests. Both were staying at a local hotel in the city."
The source added that the pair had dual citizenship but were not Afghans.
Stern test In a statement, the MoD said: "We can confirm that two British passport holders were detained in an ISAF operation conducted jointly last week by UK forces with Afghans in support.
"Detention operations are a vital element of protecting UK, ISAF and Afghan forces and Afghan civilians from those who are assessed to pose a threat regardless of their nationality.
"All detention operations in Afghanistan carried out under the remit of the UN mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which includes those conducted by British Forces, are conducted in accordance with international law and strict policy frameworks.
"No further information will be released at this stage."
The Foreign Office said embassy staff were "providing assistance".
Meanwhile, Herat was handed from Nato to Afghan control on Thursday. There was not thought to be any link between this planned event and the arrests.
It comes a day after responsibility for security in Lashkar Gah, the capital of volatile Helmand province, was handed to Afghan forces.
In recent days Nato handed over the relatively peaceful province of Bamiyan and the eastern town of Mehtar Lam.
But analysts say that maintaining stability in Lashkar Gah will be the sternest test yet for local forces.
The handover is seen as a critical step in a transition of power before foreign troops end combat operations in 2014.

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World Health Organization calls for TB blood test ban" By Matt McGrath

Blood tests designed to detect active TB are inaccurate and should be banned, the World Health Organization has said.

More than two million such tests are carried out annually, but the WHO says they are unethical and lead to misdiagnosis and the mistreatment of patients.
The organisation's review of these tuberculosis test kits says they give wrong results in around 50% of cases.
The kits are mainly sold in the developing world.
However, most of the 18 kits on the market are produced in Europe and North America.
According to Dr Mario Raviglone, the director of the WHO Stop TB Department, the tests must be banned.
He said: "A blood test for diagnosing active TB disease is bad practice. Tests are inconsistent, imprecise and put patients' lives in danger."
The tests work by detecting antibodies or antigens in the blood that are produced in response to the bacterium.
But some of these commercial tests have what's called "low sensitivity" which leads to large numbers of patients being told they do not have TB when they do.
'Unethical' Dr Karen Weyer, who is also from the WHO Stop TB department, added: "The evidence we reviewed over the past couple of months shows that one in two patients will be wrongly diagnosed, either [as] false negative or false positive.
"If it's a false negative patients get the all clear when they in fact have TB, the disease continues to spread, and the patients may die.

"If, on the other hand, it's false positive, patients are put on treatments unnecessarily while the true cause of their disease remains undiagnosed."

"We would describe this as unethical - and we are making a very strong urge to governments to consider that TB is a threat and the use of these ineffective tests is also a threat."
The WHO says that the tests which are manufactured in Europe and North America are prevented from going on sale where they are made due to regulations that call for extensive evidence of accuracy.
But this is not the case in the developing world - including in India and China.
Dr Weyer added: "One of the major problems is that these developing countries often have little or very weak regulatory mechanisms to make sure that tests are registered before they are used at country level.
"Another problem is that these tests are often used in the private sector, which is a difficult sector to regulate and as a result there is a wide misuse, I would say, of these inaccurate tests in the private sector in at least 17 countries that we are aware of."
She said there was a need for a TB test that could be used "at the bedside". But she added: "We don't have a blood test for TB that can be used at the point of care level."
The WHO says this call for a ban is a highly unusual move - It's the first time the organisation has issued an explicitly negative policy recommendation against a practice that is widely used in tuberculosis care.
TB kills 1.7m people every year, and is the biggest cause of death of people living with HIV.

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Nepal landslides kill Dutch trekker and 11 others

A Dutch trekker has been killed by a landslide in Nepal.

Another trekker and their guide were injured in the landslide in Langtang region north-west of Kathmandu.
The Dutchman is the 12th person to die this week in a series of landslides in the mountainous nation, officials say.
In one incident, a girl of 17 was killed when her home was buried in debris outside the capital, AFP news agency reported. Heavy monsoon rains trigger landslides every year in Nepal.
Analysts say the number of casualties has risen notably this year, and that the increase in landslides may be linked to changing weather patterns and deforestation.

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