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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The latest film Oscar winner James Marsh ("Man on Wire") , "Project Nim," chronicles a Columbia University professor's ill-fated attempt to raise a chimp like a human baby, in an effort to teach it ...

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, ...

Not every homo sapiens who sees Project Nim will be moved to pledge membership to PETA. Still, this documentary biopic of the ’70s chimp picked to endure an “experiment” in simian sign language and ...

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 ...