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People in a southwestern Japanese city have come under attack from monkeys that are trying to snatch babies, biting and clawing at flesh, and sneaking into nursery schools. The attacks - on 58 people since July 8 - are getting so bad Yamaguchi city hall hired a special unit to hunt the animals with tranquilizer guns. The monkeys aren't interested in food, so traps haven't worked. They have targeted mostly children and the elderly. "They are so smart, and they tend to sneak up and attack from behind, often grabbing at your legs," city official Masato Saito said ... When...

In past experiments, researchers have examined the same human gene's effect on the brain sizes of mice and ferrets. The brains did grow larger — but in those experiments, the team used an over-expression of the gene, rather than the typical human levels. So the effect could have been due to another hidden factor rather than the gene itself. Plus, crucially, mice and ferrets aren't primates — so they can't tell us how the introduction of the gene may have changed the brains of our modern ancestors. Primates are particularly interesting to researchers because — before now, they didn't know...