When we have an audience, it can affect how well we perform. New research has found that the performance of chimpanzees on challenging computer tasks is influenced by how many humans are watching.

The findings of the study suggest that the “audience effect” existed before reputation-based human societies, a press release from Cell Press said.

“It was very surprising to find that chimpanzees are affected in their task performance by audience members, and by human audience members nonetheless,” said Christen Lin of Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute, in the press release. “One might not expect a chimp to particularly care if another species is watching them perform a task, but the fact that they seem to be affected by human audiences even depending on the difficulty of the task suggests that this relationship is more complex than we would have initially expected.”

The researchers set out to see if the audience effect — frequently attributed to reputation management in humans — could also occur in a non-human primate.

“Having an audience present, even one of a different species, may be introducing some kind of pressure for the chimpanzees during their task. We hypothesize that the presence of audience members could be causing stress that increases their skill in more difficult situations, or that having more familiar audience members present might cause the chimps to subconsciously perceive the food rewards as higher value, increasing their motivation and thus their performance under more stressful conditions,” Lin told EcoWatch in an email.

The researchers already knew that people are attuned to those watching them, sometimes subconsciously, in ways that can impact their performance. Chimpanzees live in hierarchical societies, but the researchers weren’t sure to what extent they might, like humans, be influenced by having an audience.

“Our study site is special in that chimpanzees frequently interact with and even enjoy the company of humans here, participating almost daily in various touch screen experiments for food rewards,” said Akiho Muramatsu, an assistant professor at Kyoto University, in the press release. “As such, we saw the opportunity to not only explore potential similarities in audience-related effects but also to do so in the context of chimps that share unique bonds with humans.”

The touch screen experimental booth seen from the outside. Chimps and humans can see each other during the experiment. On the human side is an automatic feeder, which rotates to dispense food into a funnel for the chimpanzee. Here we see chimpanzee Ai looking at the photographer. Akiho Muramatsu

Over a period of six years, the researchers analyzed thousands of sessions during which the chimpanzees completed a task on a touch screen.

In three separate number-based tasks, they found that chimpanzees performed increasingly better on the hardest assignment as the number of familiar humans watching them increased. On the other hand, chimpanzees performed worse on the easiest task when they were being watched by a higher number of familiar people, such as the experimenters.

“The chimpanzees may already know that the easier tasks require less focus to do correctly and receive food rewards, and so they could be dedicating less attention to the touch screen tasks during these easier tasks,” Lin told EcoWatch. “Additionally, based on the distraction hypothesis, the types of skills required to perform these tasks are different and may therefore be affected in different ways under pressure. For rigid, rule-based tasks such as the easy tasks in our study, performance is expected to decline under pressure based on this hypothesis.”

Does the result mean that the established relationships chimpanzees had with the humans observing them was a factor in their performance?

“The chimps’ relationship with humans in general may have affected their performance in comparison to wild chimpanzees, for example. However, their relationship with any specific humans in the audience probably would not have affected the results in this study because we have thousands of sessions collected over several years, and different experimenters and people would be present every day,” Lin said.

The research team noted that it was still not clear what particular mechanisms were responsible for the audience-related effects in chimps and humans. They said additional research in non-human apes could provide more insight into why the trait developed and how it evolved.

“Our findings suggest that how much humans care about witnesses and audience members may not be quite so specific to our species,” said Shinya Yamamoto, an associate professor at Kyoto University, in the press release. “These characteristics are a core part of how our societies are largely based on reputation, and if chimpanzees also pay special attention towards audience members while they perform their tasks, it stands to reason that these audience-based characteristics could have evolved before reputation-based societies emerged in our great ape lineage.”

Lin said the study showed that there are similarities between chimpanzee and human behavior when people are watching.

“This study reveals that chimps can be affected by audiences watching them, much like ourselves. Knowing that chimps also can be impacted by audiences reveals another way that we are more similar to chimpanzees than many people might realize. We can also feel pressure when people are watching us, but just as the chimps did in this study, we can also clutch up and be motivated to perform even better than usual in front of an audience,” Lin told EcoWatch.

How much would chimpanzees be affected by an audience made up entirely of their peers?

“In future studies we would like to test with chimpanzee audiences of various sizes as well, as we were only able to test with human audiences this time. Our results suggest that chimpanzees might be affected by chimpanzee audience members depending on how familiar they are with them, as they were unaffected in performance by unfamiliar human audience members in our study. In terms of chimp social groups, it is clear that chimps have to modify their behavior based on who might be watching them, much like we humans have to in order to maintain our social standings and reputations in our own societies,” Lin added.

The study, “Audience presence influences cognitive task performance in chimpanzees,” was published in the journal iScience.

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Scientists have, for the first time, observed the unleashing of an enormous glacial lake flooding event in East Greenland. The rare outburst involved 3,000-plus billion liters of meltwater bursting forth in a matter of weeks.

Witnessed by researchers from the University of Copenhagen, the natural phenomenon provides insight into the powerful and potentially dangerous forces that can be released by meltwater, a press release from University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute said.

“Imagine an enormous bathtub atop a mountain filled with water equivalent to three times Denmark’s annual water consumption, and then suddenly bursting. This is essentially what happened when the massive Catalina Lake in East Greenland released 3.4 cubic kilometers of meltwater — 3,000 billion liters — into the Scoresby Sound fjord,” the press release said.

The enormous volume of water released by the lake made it one of the three largest events of its kind ever to be documented.

The meltwater outburst flood happened from September 23 to October 11, during which time the water level of Catalina Lake fell by 154 meters. The scientists were able to use satellite imagery to observe the spectacle in real time.

Satellite image of Catalina Lake in an undated photo. University of Copenhagen

“We have previously found traces of similar outburst floods, but due to polar night and clouds obstructing the potential for satellite observations, this is the first time that researchers have been able to monitor an event and measure the water volumes in real time,” explained Aslak Grinsted, a climate researcher with the Niels Bohr Institute, in the press release.

The outburst flood was caused by the accumulation of meltwater from Catalina Lake over the last two decades. The lake sits nestled in a valley obstructed by the Edward Bailey Glacier. As the lake filled up, the water started to lift the glacier, resulting in a 25-kilometer-long, carved-out tunnel underneath the ice. The pressure from the water building up finally caused it to burst into Scoresby Sound, the largest fjord on Earth.

The phenomenon of a glacial lake gradually filling and releasing its meltwater in a rush is known as a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF).

Events such as this have been happening more often in the past 30 years due to global heating and climate change.

“The danger from glacier-dammed lakes is increasing due to global warming. It’s vital to improve our understanding of this phenomenon to issue timely warnings should there be an imminent risk,” Grinsted warned.

The recent GLOF in East Greenland did not cause any harm due to the area’s sparse population. However, floods like this can be catastrophic in more populated areas such as the Himalayas, where villages are frequently destroyed. A 2023 study found that 15 million people globally live under threat of dangerous glacial floods.

“I expect that we will witness outbursts from even larger ice-dammed lakes as Greenland’s ice sheet retreats in coming centuries. At the end of the last Ice Age, Lake Missoula had an outburst that was 2,500 times larger than the recent Catalina event. To understand these massive forces, we must study the largest outbursts when they occur,” Grinsted said. “In this case, the energy released by the glacier flood was equivalent to the output of the world’s largest nuclear power plant running at full capacity for 22 days.”

Grinsted said it was worth considering how the incredible power of such natural phenomena could be harnessed as a green energy source. The energy produced by the event at Catalina Lake could theoretically have generated 50 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power a small town.

In this instance, however, the closest human settlement of 350 residents was 180 kilometers away, which would pose a major technological challenge for energy transmission and potential use.

“As with many other natural resources in Greenland, infrastructure is a problem. But if a brilliant engineer could figure out how to harness these meltwater outbursts, there’s enormous power and energy potential in them,” Grinsted concluded.

“The danger from glacier-dammed lakes is increasing due to global warming. It’s vital to improve our understanding of this phenomenon to issue timely warnings should there be an imminent risk,” says Grinsted.

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An abnormally active typhoon season that hit the Philippines this year was “supercharged” by climate change, according to a new attribution study published Thursday by the World Weather Attribution (WWA).

The report found that climate change exacerbated the conditions that led to the typhoon season and made the formation of typhoons nearly twice as likely.

The team noted that six major storms hit the country in less than a month, including five typhoons and one major tropical cyclone — an anomaly compared to the three average typhoons the country experiences in an entire year.

The storms, which killed more than 170 people, formed in a span of 23 days from late October to mid-November, each hitting Luzon, the country’s largest and most populated island, and impacted more than 13 million people, the study says.

Ben Clarke, a researcher at the WWA and the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, wrote in a press release, “While it is unusual to see so many typhoons hit the Philippines in less than a month, the conditions that gave rise to these storms are increasing as the climate warms.

The researchers used their standard parameter of “potential intensity,” or their evaluation of the maximum wind speed possible under certain conditions, to evaluate the extent to which climate change affected the storms.

“It was therefore appropriate to study an area over the ocean just to the east of the Philippines, in which all of the storms that affected the Philippines developed,” Clarke told EcoWatch in an email.

The potential intensity is calculated using both real-world observations and large-scale computer models of storms.

Clarke told reporters in a video conference that the researchers also calculated the storms’ wind speeds using their IRIS storm model and combined that with their “understanding of of the physics and the factors that are really important for cyclone intensity.”

“So from these 2 analyses,” Clarke said, “we find that the conditions in which the storms developed in 2024 have become about 70% more likely due to warming of 1.3 degrees. That means that the storms were more likely to develop more strongly and reach the Philippines at a higher intensity than they otherwise would have.”

“On the hazard side,” Clarke wrote in an email, “the biggest takeaways are that the conditions in which these storms all developed are more likely due to climate change (mostly but probably not entirely because of ocean heating) and that the Philippines should expect more years in which more than three major typhoons make landfall.” 

Afrhill Rances, a regional communications manager for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in the Philippines, said in the press briefing that this year’s typhoon season revealed significant vulnerabilities and heightened exposure to climate impact in the Philippines, especially in Luzon.

Rances cited urban sprawl, deforestation and river silting as factors leading to “compounding risks” for rural communities and cities in Luzon.

The report also looked into what future typhoon seasons might look like under warmer conditions, Clarke said. “At 2.6 degrees of global warming — which is kind of the optimistic side of what we’re currently on track for given implemented national policies — we would find that these conditions will increase by about 40% again, compared to now. And that’s in likelihood. So we’ll see them 40% more often, and this is likely a relatively conservative estimate.”

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According to the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s 2024 Arctic Report Card, tundra in the Arctic is becoming a net source of carbon dioxide, rather than the climate-beneficial carbon sink it has been for millennia.

This year was the second warmest in the Arctic, based on data dating back to 1900, the report said. Across the region, temperatures from October 2023 to September 2025 were 1.20 degrees Celsius above the average for 1991 to 2020, a press release from NOAA said.

“The Arctic continues to warm at a faster rate than the global average. The 2024 Arctic Report Card highlights record-breaking and near-record-breaking observations that demonstrate dramatic change, including Arctic tundra transformation from carbon sink to carbon source, declines of previously large inland caribou herds, and increasing winter precipitation,” NOAA said. “Adaptation is increasingly necessary and Indigenous Knowledge and community-led research programs are essential to understand and respond to rapid Arctic changes.”

The Arctic autumn of 2023 was the second warmest ever recorded, while this summer was the third warmest — as well as the wettest — across the Arctic. The past nine years were also the Arctic’s nine warmest on record.

An early August heatwave set a daily all-time temperature record in several communities in northern Canada and Alaska.

Precipitation in the Arctic has been increasing since 1950, with the most pronounced surges occuring in winter.

“Our observations now show that the Arctic tundra, which is experiencing warming and increased wildfire, is now emitting more carbon than it stores, which will worsen climate change impacts,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, as The Guardian reported.

High-latitude wildfires are also becoming more intense due to human-caused climate change. Wildfires release carbon into the atmosphere through the burning of vegetation and the organic matter stored in soils. The fires strip soils of their insulating layers, which speeds up long-term permafrost thaw, along with the release of associated carbon emissions.

“In recent years, we’ve seen how increasing fire activity from climate change threatens both communities and the carbon stored in permafrost, but now we’re beginning to be able to measure the cumulative impact to the atmosphere, and it’s significant,” said Dr. Brendan Rogers, a scientist with the Woodwell Climate Research Center who contributed to the report, as reported by The Guardian.

When permafrost thaws, microbes decompose its carbon stores, releasing greenhouse gases, including methane.

“We need accurate, holistic and comprehensive knowledge of how climate changes will affect the amount of carbon the Arctic is taking up and storing, and how much it’s releasing back into the atmosphere, in order to effectively address this crisis,” said Dr. Sue Natali, a Woodwell Center scientist who also contributed to the research. “This report represents a critical step toward quantifying these emissions at scale.”

Currently, Arctic temperatures are warming as much as four times faster than the worldwide average. The report found that this is the 11th consecutive year warming in the Arctic has been happening more rapidly than the global rate.

“The climate catastrophe we’re seeing in the Arctic is already bringing consequences for communities around the world,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, as The Guardian reported. “The alarming harbinger of a net carbon source being unleashed sooner rather than later doesn’t bode well. Once reached, many of these thresholds of adverse impacts on ecosystems cannot be reversed.”

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A new study has revealed that modern batteries in electric vehicles may last up to 40% longer than expected thanks to stop-and-go driving patterns that help recharge batteries on the go.

According to researchers, the common lab testing methods to determine battery life may not be the most accurate way to estimate how long EV batteries will last. In lab testing, batteries are often discharged at an ongoing rate, then recharged all at once. 

But as the researchers pointed out, EV drivers experience different discharge rates in long spans of driving or stop-and-go traffic. These more frequent cycles of discharging the battery and recharging during braking could help preserve battery life.

Researchers tested 92 commercial lithium-ion batteries for a 24-month period, using both the constant discharge method as well as real-driving scenarios. The batteries tested under real driving methods had a better life expectancy, with about 38% improvement, compared to those tested under common lab testing scenarios. The team published the findings in the journal Nature Energy.

“To our surprise, real driving with frequent acceleration, braking that charges the batteries a bit, stopping to pop into a store, and letting the batteries rest for hours at a time, helps batteries last longer than we had thought based on industry standard lab tests,” Simona Onori, senior author of the study and an associate professor of energy science and engineering at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, said in a statement.

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, EV batteries are estimated to last for around 12 to 15 years in mild climates or around 8 to 12 years in extreme climates. But the real battery degradation of EVs is still difficult to determine, since many EVs that are currently on the road were bought within the last few years, Recurrent Auto reported, with many EV batteries lasting well beyond the common 8-year, 100,000 mile warranty.

Although Electrek reported that battery prices just fell by the biggest rate since 2017, with a 20% drop in battery prices for 2024, the prices can still be of concern to consumers considering the switch to an EV over a gas-fueled vehicle. As the study authors pointed out, EV batteries still make up about one-third of the cost of a new electric car. Further, according to NerdWallet, replacing an out-of-warranty electric car battery can cost between $5,000 to $20,000. 

But with an increased longevity for EV batteries, swapping to an EV could be a more economical choice for consumers when compared to paying for more frequent battery replacements, plus fuel, in gas-powered vehicles. As NerdWallet reported, traditional vehicle batteries cost around $60 to $300 each, with replacements necessary every 3 to 5 years, according to AAA.

As Electrek reported, electric batteries are predicted to fall even lower in the coming years, reaching around $69 per kWh by 2030.

The findings could also improve consumer confidence in secondhand EVs, considering a Green Finance Institute survey found that 62% of respondents who didn’t already own an EV said they wouldn’t buy a used electric car due to concerns over battery health.

Although the researchers noted that dynamic cycling can extend the lifespan of an EV battery compared to constant cycling, they explained that time-induced aging will still affect batteries. Proper battery charging practices and vehicle maintenance will still be important for users to consider when maximizing the lifespan of their EV batteries.

“We battery engineers have assumed that cycle aging is much more important than time-induced aging. That’s mostly true for commercial EVs like buses and delivery vans that are almost always either in use or being recharged,” said Alexis Geslin, a lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering as well as in computer science at Stanford University’s School of Engineering. “For consumers using their EVs to get to work, pick up their kids, go to the grocery store, but mostly not using them or even charging them, time becomes the predominant cause of aging over cycling.”

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