There are parrots with large and complex vocabularies, apesthat can sign, and a pod of dolphins that recently saved agroup of human swimmers from a shark attack.

Now, it seems that prairie dogs don’t just yap a fewsignals, they have a complex language that evolves withtime, has dialects, and contains hundreds of words.

According to Northern Arizona University biology professorCon Slobodchikoff, prairie dogs have different words fordifferent specific people who come around their towns,different words for different types of bird flying overhead,and can come up with new words for things they’ve never seenbefore.
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Mice are being grown with human brain cells in their brains.Pigs are being raised that have human blood. Sheep withhuman hearts and livers have been created in a Nevadalaboratory. These creatures are called chimeras,human-animal hybrids.

In Europe, China and Japan, even more complex chimeras arebeing created in laboratories that are racing to use thesestrange beings to create radical new treatments that areexpected to revolutionize medicine.

Chimeras make it possible for scientists to study organs asthey function, rather than in artificial laboratorysettings, and represent a tremendous medical advance.
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Bird flu persists in Asia, and that worries health officialsworldwide. The H5N1 virus is so lethal that it is believedthat it could kill fifty million people if it mutates andbecomes transmissible from human to human.

In 1997, virologists did not believe that the virus could betransmitted from birds to humans, but the deaths of 6 of 18people who got the illness in Hong Kong that year provedthem wrong.

At the time, the virus could only infect birds, but it hasbeen mutating at exceptional speed, and now is known to beable to infect cats, pigs and tigers.
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Kuzya was taken to Yakutsk. Didn’t care for it–too noisy,too dusty, to unlike his beloved village home of Olenyok. SoKuzya took off, much to the distress of the Efremovs, whohad come to love their little friend of two years.

Despite all their efforts, they couldn’t find Kuzya.Finally, they had to return home. Sadly, they left Yaktuskfor their little village. It was a long journey becauseSiberia is a big place. In fact, it was a journey of 1,335miles, most of it along narrow roads through the fastness ofthe great Siberian forest.

Home was not the same without Kuzya…until the day, threemonths later, that he showed up at the door.
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