Startling Images Which Show How Chimpanzees Mourn Their Dead

A Mother's Grief: The Startling Images Which Show How Chimpanzees Mourn Their Dead Just Like Humans -- The Daily Mail

Chimpanzees appear to mourn their dead infants just like humans, scientists have discovered.

Chimpanzee mothers establish close physical relationships with their young, carrying them for up to two years and nursing them until they are six.

But now scientists have filmed how one chimpanzee mother, whose 16-month-old infant died, apparently begins the grieving process.

It’s the latest evidence highlighting just how similar chimps and other great apes are to humans.

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My Comment: A fascinating video. It appears that we are not too different after all.

Chimps Understand And Mourn Death, Research Suggests

The chimpanzee Pansy, the morning after she died.
Credit: Nicola McCleery, Blair Drummond Safari Park.

From Live Science:

Chimpanzees may gather in hushed quiet to watch a fellow ape in her dying moments, and chimp mothers in the wild may carry their infants' mummified remains for weeks, according to new research on how humanity's closest living relatives deal with the deaths of those closest to them.

Insights into how chimpanzees respond to the death of one of their own are rare. One such instance came with the final hours of Pansy, a chimp more than 50 years old who lived in a Scottish safari park.

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How Carbon Dioxide In The Blood Could Be Responsible For Near-Death Experiences

Towards the light: People who have out-of-body experiences on the operating table may have high levels of carbon dioxide in their blood

From The Daily Mail:

Some experience an out-of-body floating sensation, others an intense feeling of joy and peace.

Now scientists believe they have explained what causes the near death experiences reported by thousands of people on the operating table.

A study of heart attack victims has found a link between out of body experiences and high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood.

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Q & A: Is There Life After Death?

ERproductions Ltd / Blend Images / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Is there life after death? Theologians can debate all they want, but radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long argues that if you look at the scientific evidence, the answer is unequivocally yes. Drawing on a decade's worth of research on near-death experiences — work that includes cataloguing the stories of some 1,600 people who have gone through them — he makes the case for that controversial conclusion in a new book, Evidence of the Afterlife. Medicine, Long says, cannot account for the consistencies in the accounts reported by people all over the world. He talked to TIME about the nature of near-death experience, the intersection between religion and science and the Oprah effect.

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What And When Is Death?

From The New Atlantis:

All living things die. This is not new and it has nothing to do with technology. What is new in our technological age, however, is an uncertainty about when death has come for some human beings. These human beings, as an unintended consequence of efforts to prevent death, are left suspended at its threshold. Observing them in this state of suspension, we, the living, have a very hard time knowing what to think: Is the living being still among us? Is there still a present for this person or has the long reign of the past tense begun: Is he or was he? The phenomenon is popularly known as “brain death,” but the name is misleading. Death accepts no modifiers. There is only one death. Has it occurred or not? Alive or dead?

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Find Out How You'll Die, In 4 Easy Online Steps

What Will Finally Do You In?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44165698@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

From Popular Science:

A new website lets you figure out how you might die, by sorting death data by cause of death, sex, and age. For American males ages 20-29, the most common cause of death is accidents (40.2 percent of deaths), followed by homicide (17.5 percent), and suicide (11.7 percent). Urinary tract infections? 0.3 percent.

The Death Risk Rankings site was compiled by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and seems to have about a zillion ways to organize the data. It's quite cumbersome to use, so I'm going to save you the effort.

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What And When Is Death?

From The New Atlantis:

All living things die. This is not new and it has nothing to do with technology. What is new in our technological age, however, is an uncertainty about when death has come for some human beings. These human beings, as an unintended consequence of efforts to prevent death, are left suspended at its threshold. Observing them in this state of suspension, we, the living, have a very hard time knowing what to think: Is the living being still among us? Is there still a present for this person or has the long reign of the past tense begun: Is he or was he? The phenomenon is popularly known as “brain death,” but the name is misleading. Death accepts no modifiers. There is only one death. Has it occurred or not? Alive or dead?

Read more ....

World’s Largest Study Of Near-Death Experiences To Start

From World-Science:

The Uni­ver­s­ity of South­amp­ton, U.K. an­nounced it is launch­ing this week the world’s largest-ever study on wheth­er peo­ple have thoughts for a time while they are clin­ic­ally “dead.”

The AWARE (A­WAre­ness dur­ing RE­sus­cita­t­ion) study is to be launched by the Hu­man Con­scious­ness Proj­ect at the uni­ver­s­ity, an in­terna­t­ional col­la­bora­t­ion of sci­en­tists and physi­cians who study the brain, con­scious­ness and clin­ical death.

The study is led by Sam Par­nia of Weill Cor­nell Med­i­cal Cen­ter in New York, with Uni­ver­s­ity of South­amp­ton re­search­ers. Fol­low­ing an 18-month pi­lot phase at some U.K. hos­pi­tals, the study is now be­ing ex­pand­ed to in­clude oth­er cen­tres with­in the U.K., main­land Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, Par­nia said.

“Con­trary to pop­u­lar per­­cep­tion,” Par­nia said, “death is not a spe­cif­ic mo­ment. It is a pro­cess that be­gins when the heart stops beat­ing, the lungs stop work­ing and the brain ceases func­tion­ing—a med­i­cal con­di­tion termed car­di­ac ar­rest, which from a bi­o­log­i­cal view­point is syn­on­y­mous with clin­ical death.

“Dur­ing a car­di­ac ar­rest, all three cri­te­ria of death are pre­s­ent. There then fol­lows a per­i­od of time, which may last from a few sec­onds to an hour or more, in which emer­gen­cy med­i­cal ef­forts may suc­ceed in restart­ing the heart and re­vers­ing the dy­ing pro­cess. What peo­ple ex­pe­ri­ence dur­ing this per­i­od of car­di­ac ar­rest pro­vides a un­ique win­dow of un­der­stand­ing in­to what we are all likely to ex­pe­ri­ence dur­ing the dy­ing pro­cess.”

Some stud­ies have found that 10 to 20 percent of peo­ple who go through car­di­ac ar­rest and clin­ical death re­port lu­cid, well struc­tured thought pro­cesses, rea­son­ing, mem­o­ries and some­times de­tailed re­call of events dur­ing their en­coun­ter with death, Par­nia said.

Dur­ing the AWARE stu­dy, doc­tors will use soph­is­t­icated tech­nol­o­gy to study the brain and con­scious­ness dur­ing car­di­ac ar­rest. At the same time, they plan to test the val­id­ity of out of body ex­pe­ri­ences and claims of be­ing able to “see” and “hear” dur­ing car­di­ac ar­rest.