Monkeys

Ladies flocked to the Brighton Music Hall on Tuesday night for a meet-and-greet with the band 100 Monkeys - which is fronted by actor Jackson Rathbone of the "Twilight" series and "The Last Airbender. " Rathbone, who plays Robert Pattinson 's vampire brother in the "Twilight" films, was nice enough to sign paraphernalia for fans. He even put his signature on the back of young Emily Conte 's shirt. Rathbone's no stranger to the Boston area. He appears in the Wayland-based movie "Girlfriend," which will be screened at this year's Woods Hole Film Festival on Aug. 5. Rathbone's Wayland-bred director, Justin...

A Florida man is charged with felony drunken driving and wildlife violations after police discovered a small monkey in his truck. Largo Police say Eugene Carl Kotelman was speeding when they stopped him Thursday. He was driving on a suspended license and had been previously charged numerous times with driving on a suspended license and DUI. Officers noticed a "small monkey" in Kotelman's truck and released the primate to his friend. After Kotelman was released on bond from the DUI charge, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers charged him with possession of...

It will be an ad like no other. Hoping to learn how advertising works, a Yale University psychologist has teamed up with a New York ad agency to design and test a novel marketing campaign - aimed at monkeys. The idea is to explore whether susceptibility to messages, such as those used in marketing, is deeply ingrained in humans because it is embedded in our DNA - inherited from long-ago ancestors common to us and monkeys - or whether it is a strictly human weakness. The research is part of a broader effort to understand the evolutionary origins of our thought processes and behaviors, especially when...

The death in February of a dehydrated cotton-top tamarin monkey at a Harvard Medical School primate research facility has been reviewed by a federal inspector and found to be a direct violation of animal welfare regulations. The report of the March 7 inspection by the US Department of Agriculture, recently made available online, is the seventh incident cited by the agency to have directly endangered the safety or welfare of a monkey at the New England Primate Research Center since June 2010.

How long would it take a million monkeys bashing away on a million keyboards to reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare? Not long, as it turns out: Using "virtual monkeys," Jesse Anderson, a computer programmer from Nevada, has reproduced 99.9% of Shakespeare's work -- and his monkeys have only been at it since August 21. Anderson's monkeys are computer programs; though they run on his home computer, they borrow their processing...

ATLANTA -- Primate specialist Jane Goodall and 18 other researchers sent a letter to federal officials urging them to oppose an Atlanta research center's proposal to do AIDS-related research on sooty mangabey monkeys. The letter urges the US Fish & Wildlife Service to reject a request by the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, according to a copy filed with the government. Scientists at the research center have nurtured a group of the primates, which are natural carriers of a form of the AIDS virus but don't get sick from it, since the late 1960s.

STOCKBRIDGE - In 1940, Hans Augusto Rey and his wife, Margret, were at the top of their game. Between 1937 and 1939, with Hans doing the illustrations and Margret fleshing out the story lines, they had had no fewer than seven children's books published. They had also completed the manuscripts and illustrations for at least four others. One of the unfinished works was called "Raffy and the 9 Monkeys. " It was about a lonely giraffe (aren't all giraffes lonely up there?) who became friends (thank heavens!

Monday's Science on Screen event at the Coolidge Corner Theatre was sold out, which means that a roomful of people got to hear acclaimed science writer Carl Zimmer (inset) talk about epidemics taking out the human race. Zimmer, whose speech preceded a screening of the Brad Pitt movie "12 Monkeys," said that it's very possible that an epidemic could do us in, and that the plot of "12 Monkeys" (the disease stuff, not the time travel), has probably happened before. "He wasn't being alarmist," Coolidge events guy Jesse Hassinger told us. "It was entertaining.

Scientists have long believed that a vaccine is the best way to stop the spread of AIDS, but efforts to invent one have miserably flopped. Now they may have found something already on pharmacy shelves that seems to prevent infection. It's a combination of two drugs that have shown such promise in early experiments in monkeys that officials just expanded tests of them in people around the world. "This is the first thing I've seen at this point that I think really could have a prevention impact," said Thomas Folks, a federal scientist since the earliest...

SALEM — Even in the delightfully dizzying art bazaar that is the Peabody Essex Museum, this highly detailed sculptural rendering of a bazaar in Calcutta leaps out at you. It has everything, from an assortment of fresh fish for sale to a visiting Chinese man. You can find a stall selling fruit, another selling spices, a dwarf, a dog, and some monkeys. The attention to detail is extraordinary. Hanging out with the monkeys on the thatched roof, for instance, is a smattering of pigeons.

Environmental Police recently received a tip that there was some monkey business going on at a Lowell house -- literally. When the officers showed up at the Lowell house, a woman resident admitted that her husband was keeping a marmoset monkey, about the size of a small squirrel, as a pet. "We try to verify the fact that it wasn't some legally owned pet misidentified as an exotic or endangered species," Environmental Police Major Wilton F....

CAMBRIDGE - Harvard University has pledged to improve the care of monkeys after recent deaths at its research center in Southborough, but two dozen protesters who gathered at Harvard Square yesterday said the steps do not go far enough. "Our aim would be for them to shut down," said Laura Ray of Boston, who helped organize the protest. "If they can't even keep those animals alive, what kind of science can they do?" Protesters, who also gathered in Southborough, held signs that read "Harvard Negligence Kills Animals!"

IT WAS unfortunate but understandable when a monkey died after escaping its handler at Harvard University's New England Primate Research Center last October: Unpredictable situations are bound to happen when working with animals, even under the best of circumstances. But now that two additional monkeys have died and two more have been seriously injured in the past three months - each as the direct result of human error - the situation has evolved into an emergency. University president Drew Faust is attempting to wrangle control of events,...

Harvard Medical School suspended new experiments at its New England Primate Research Center after a cotton top tamarin monkey died Sunday. It was the fourth monkey to die there under questionable circumstances in less than two years. While the incident is still being investigated, the elderly monkey did not have a water bottle in its cage, and the absence of water probably contributed to its death, a Harvard official said yesterday. The monkey was euthanized Sunday, the same day the Department of Agriculture made public an inspection report that revealed three serious episodes of...

A dehydrated squirrel monkey died at a Harvard Medical School research facility in December - the third monkey to die at the New England Primate Research Center in 19 months - and additional animals there suffered a fracture and other harm over the past three months, according to a federal inspection report released yesterday. The most recent problems prompted the US Department of Agriculture to cite Harvard for three serious episodes of endangering animals. Nationwide, there were 25 such occurrences at research facilities in the previous fiscal year.

STOCKBRIDGE - In 1940, Hans Augusto Rey and his wife, Margret, were at the top of their game. Between 1937 and 1939, with Hans doing the illustrations and Margret fleshing out the story lines, they had had no fewer than seven children's books published. They had also completed the manuscripts and illustrations for at least four others. One of the unfinished works was called "Raffy and the 9 Monkeys. " It was about a lonely giraffe (aren't all giraffes lonely up there?) who became friends (thank heavens!

If it’s useless, it must be art Walk through most any art museum, and you’ll see two sorts of art object. First, there are the objects that we now call “art,” but which were originally made for some other purpose: altarpieces, vases, swords, portraits of young women designed to attract suitors, and so on. Then there are the works of art, often made more recently, which serve no purpose besides being art. Today, uselessness is a central...

SIMIEN MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, Ethiopia — As dilemmas go, this was a good one: Watch 50-odd monkeys cavorting across an escarpment studded with giant lobelias or keep drinking in the scene beyond the crags around Chenek camp, where the rising sun was peeling back the shadows to reveal an endless expanse of buttes and mesas. In the end I went with the monkeys. Plenty more opportunity to gawp at the lowlands, I thought. I had spent the last few days discovering what happens when geothermal explosions and erosion conspire to sculpt a precipice more than 37 miles long.

A beloved squirrel monkey known as Banana Sam was returned scared but safe to the San Francisco Zoo on Saturday night, two days after he was taken. Banana Sam was "hungry, trembling and thirsty," after police returned him to the zoo, but a full physical examination showed he was healthy, zoo spokesman Danny Latham said in a statement. The 17-year-old monkey was found at Stern Grove, a park about a mile from the zoo, police spokesman Carlos Manfredi said. The monkey was found by a bystander who saw him come out of the bushes.

Monday's Science on Screen event at the Coolidge Corner Theatre was sold out, which means that a roomful of people got to hear acclaimed science writer Carl Zimmer (inset) talk about epidemics taking out the human race. Zimmer, whose speech preceded a screening of the Brad Pitt movie "12 Monkeys," said that it's very possible that an epidemic could do us in, and that the plot of "12 Monkeys" (the disease stuff, not the time travel), has probably happened before. "He wasn't being alarmist," Coolidge events guy Jesse Hassinger told us. "It was entertaining.