Share links need accounts anyway? Is this new?

"You have free access to this story. Continue reading with a Times account"

What's wrong with bananas?

so are people! we overthrew multiple countries for banan

Me too.

archive.ph isn’t working for me, but .is works

https://archive.is/EHCxx

"Breaking: Animals Have Preferences"

> But he’s also very interested in “the impact of crystals on the history of art and the history of mind,”

This made my eyes roll a bit.

Sure seems stupid on first glance but most science seems pointless. It’s only when several loosely interconnected ideas that prove something MIGHT be commercially viable do we find out that it was the first curious question that … again seems stupid… was the seed of inivation

> I’m willing to bet they will go after the smooth rocks and it’s about rarity, not crystals.

Why? Crystals are pretty, rocks are not. We clearly prefer shiny colorful things to dull beige things, even if shiny things are abundant.

You have a question, a hypothesis and designed an experiment to test it.

The study had a harder question: "What properties of crystalline stones attracted them?". The abstract has this answer: "We found that transparency and geometric shape were the two attractors guiding chimpanzees."

Maybe this is scientific proof for the diamond industry.

If you read the original paper (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....) then they go into more detail on the piles of pebbles and what got taken; the graphs in figure 4 (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....) make it very obvious that the chimps loved the crystals.

(an "euhedral" crystal is one with lots of obvious facets, an "anhedral" one is one that's been rounded down into a more pebble shape.)