Humans are often thought to be the only animals capable of language. But it's difficult to prove a negative like this because we'll never definitively know the subjective interior monologues of other ...

Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called "Project Nim." Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was ...

In this archival episode of The Ear, reporter Alicia Theologides Rodriguez commemorates the 50th anniversary of a controversial Columbia study that explored whether chimps possess the cognitive ...

Researchers may have taught a chimp named Nim to communicate via sign language back in the mid-’70s, but it was humans who learned the most from the experiment, as detailed in director James Marsh‘s ...

His name was Nim Chimpsky, an unusually talented creature whose 26-year lifespan on this planet (1973-2000) was deeply compromised by callous, egomaniacal scientists who exploited him by trying to ...

Many people feel comforted and understood by animals. In that sense, they communicate with them. What they can't do, however, is talk with an animal. Whereas all animals, ourselves included, ...

Robert with Onan signing "hat". Source: Robert Ingersoll, with permission. I recently learned of a book by Robert Ingersoll and Antonina Anna Scarnà titled Primatology, Ethics, and Trauma: The ...

In what is surely one of the most memorable and intelligent recent books about animal-human interaction, Hess (Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter) tells the ...

Raised like a child, studied as an experiment and returned to captivity when his animal instincts surfaced, Nim Chimpsky lived a life that was as exceptional as it was heart-wrenching. From the ...

This story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist. If you find value in independent local reporting, make a donation to power our newsroom today. Listen 0:00 Back in the 1970s, a ...

Could a chimpanzee raised from infancy by a human family bridge the gap between species--and change the way we think about the boundaries between animal and human? Here is the strange and moving ...