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Chimp Haven, the world's largest chimpanzee sanctuary

Chimp Haven, the world's largest chimpanzee sanctuary

Yahoo13-04-2025
Spread out across 200 acres in Northwest Louisiana, Chimp Haven is the world's largest chimpanzee sanctuary. Every detail, from the moat to the meal plan, has been designed to ensure the more than 300 residents here are getting the most out of their retirement years.
"A lot of the chimpanzees that are here, they spent decades in biomedical research before coming to sanctuary, but Chimp Haven provides their happy endings," said Rana Smith, the president and CEO of Chimp Haven.
"Chimpanzees have been used in research for decades," Smith explained. "So, back in the 1950s and 1960s, they were part of the NASA space program, and in the '70s, kind of moved into infectious disease."
Chimpanzees were instrumental in the development of everything from rocket ships to the Hepatitis B vaccine. In the 1980s, they were used in HIV research. But, precisely because of how similar they are to us, attitudes about chimp research began to change — in 2000, Congress passed the CHIMP Act, establishing a sanctuary system to care for retired research chimpanzees.
At the time, lawmakers introduced the Act as a "humane" piece of legislation meant to protect "a group who have no lobby." It required the National Institutes of Health to kick in 75% of the funding for retirees, which isn't peanuts. It costs around $25,000 a year to care for each chimp, with donations supplementing federal funds. The banana budget alone is impressive — they go through 117,000 of them a year.
Colony Director Michelle Reininger, like all staff at Chimp Haven, knows each of the chimps by name. Reininger said, for her, their personalities set these animals apart from any other species.
"I like the sassy ones," she said. "I like the ones who you have to really work hard to get them to respond to you, and to trust you. When you get that trust, there's no feeling like it in the world, to have that bond with an animal."
Days at the sanctuary are full of head scratches and lots of lazing around. The animals also receive regular checkups from veterinarian Raven Jackson.
"Chimpanzee medicine is challenging," Jackson said. "It's like working with a really strong toddler. And so, I always say, each day I start with, 'Am I smarter than a chimp?'"
There are days when Jackson feels outsmarted.
"I work for them and they don't work for me," she laughed.
Since Jackson's patients were retired at different ages, and a few are rescues or former pets, she treats a wide variety of conditions. Some of the chimps are as young as 7, while others are in their mid-60s.
"We see the full gamut," Jackson said. "It keeps things very interesting. And I think it also keeps things interesting for the chimpanzees, because we're able to put them in these very dynamic social groupings where you're going to see various age ranges."
Each of the 30 or so groups has its own characteristics and alpha leader. They don't always get along, but they're quick to make up.
"They always want to reconcile very quickly," said Jackson. "It taught me, hey, it isn't worth holding onto anything. Like, learn from the chimps. Let it go. Reconcile, so that you can continue to move forward as a group."
Moving forward a sanctuary like Chimp Haven may one day be unnecessary. Ten years ago, the NIH announced that it would no longer support any biomedical research on chimpanzees.
While there are still some new arrivals — chimps that labs had initially deemed too challenging to move — eventually there will no longer be chimpanzees "retiring" from careers they never chose.
Asked whether humans owe a debt to the chimpanzees, Smith replied: "Chimpanzees have given so much of their life to science. And we feel like it's our responsibility, and the government's responsibility to care for those chimps for the rest of their life."
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How NASA's Juno Probe Changed Everything We Know about Jupiter
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How NASA's Juno Probe Changed Everything We Know about Jupiter

The Juno spacecraft has rewritten the story on Jupiter, the solar system's undisputed heavyweight The NASA spacecraft tasked with uncovering the secrets of Jupiter, king of the planets, is running out of time. The Juno probe has already survived far longer than anticipated—its path around the solar system's largest planet has repeatedly flown it through a tempest of radiation that should have corroded away its instruments and electronics long ago. And yet here it is: one of the greatest planetary detectives ever built, still pirouetting around Jupiter, fully functional. But it may not be for long. September 2025 marks the end of Juno's extended mission. Although it could get another reprieve—an extended-extended mission—the spacecraft cannot carry on forever. Eventually the probe is fated to plunge into Jupiter's stormy skies, to lethal effect. Regardless of when that happens, the spacecraft's legacy is indelible. 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His wife, though, had the power to see through these clouds and monitor his shenanigans. Her name was Juno. In the late 1970s the two Voyager space probes gave humanity its first spectacularly detailed look at the gas giant. Unlike the deific Juno, they couldn't see Jupiter's buried secrets—but they were sufficiently inspiring for Bolton, who was a college student at the time. 'I had been a huge Star Trek fan and had fantasized about traveling around and wondering what the rest of the universe was like,' he says. When someone from JPL gave a talk at his school and showcased Voyager 1's jaw-dropping shots of Jupiter and its maelstroms, he was sold. 'I'd never seen anything like it.' In 1980 Bolton got a job at JPL, just as Voyager 1 was about to greet Saturn. Later he became part of the Galileo project, a mission to study Jupiter's atmosphere and magnetic field that orbited the planet from 1995 to 2003. 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'There was no theory that could even remotely explain this,' says Chris Moeckel, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. His first thought was that 'there's no way this is right.' But the data were sound. A complicated idea arose to make sense of the phenomenon. When the sky-high ammonia turns upwelling water-ice into liquid, the water and ammonia bond to form a peculiar slush with a water-ice shell. Ultimately softball-size globules of slush encased in ice fall back into the planet, where they melt at depths thought to be too extreme for Juno's instruments to detect. For a few years this theory seemed a bit too baroque to be true. But Moeckel and his colleagues became convinced thanks to the power of Juno's microwave radiometer. The instrument can measure radio waves that betray the presence of different chemical compounds. During one of its orbits, Juno noted a burst of ammonia production at an exceptional depth within the planet. 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Instead Jupiter contains an ocean of hydrogen, one under so much pressure that electrons are torn off individual hydrogen atoms, transforming it into an exotic, metal-like electrical fluid that generates its mighty magnetic field. Below the hydrogen sea lies an even bigger mystery—the question of what's inside the planet's innermost core. What Juno found there left scientists reeling. Before the spacecraft arrived, there were two prevailing notions about Jupiter's interior. The first was that the planet may have a compact core of rocky and metallic matter, not dissimilar to the cores of other worlds. If such a core exists, then Jupiter likely formed through the gradual clumping together of gas and solid matter, like the planets of the inner solar system. The second hypothesis was that there is no core at all. Instead Juno might find a ball of hypercompressed gas, suggesting Jupiter's formation was a bit like a failed star, one that didn't gather enough gas to trigger a thermonuclear ignition. 'Actually neither of those was true,' Bolton says. Juno used gravitational detective work to sense the core. The spacecraft is constantly communicating with Earth using radio waves. Jupiter's uneven mass means that Juno speeds up at times and slows down at others, depending on the strength of the gravitational pull it's experiencing. These speed changes cause subtle shifts in the wavelengths of the radio transmissions Juno sends and receives—effects that scientists can use to determine the internal structure of Jupiter. What they found was at first nonsensical. Deep within the metallic hydrogen ocean Juno detected an innermost core of, well, something; it's probably solid, but researchers can't tell. 'It's blending gradually into the surrounding layers,' says Ryan Park, a researcher at JPL and one of the leads on the gravity experiment on Juno. The hydrogen and the core material seem to mingle. The situation is very different from Earth's depths, where a lighter rocky mantle floats atop a denser iron and nickel core, between which is a distinct and definitive boundary. 'We frankly don't know how to explain that,' Levin says. And it gets weirder still. The sun and Jupiter are rich in both hydrogen and helium but are also expected to contain a smattering of heavier elements. Jupiter, a huge planet that most likely ate up rocky and icy planet-size shards during its formation, should contain far more heavy elements than the sun. And indeed, Juno found that Jupiter has three to four times as many heavy elements as our star. The problem, though, is that these elements appear to be found in the upper atmosphere—and the innermost core is comparatively lacking. All that heavy stuff should sink, via gravity, into the core. But apparently it hasn't. If the core is so light, then what could it possibly be made of? Scientists are scrambling for answers. This fuzzy core doesn't fit with anyone's model for planetary formation. Some scientists have suggested a giant meteor crashed into a once solid core, smashing it up and forcefully mixing it with the metallic hydrogen ocean. Levin wonders whether we simply don't understand the physics yet. 'We're talking about temperatures and pressures much higher than anything we're used to,' he says—conditions so severe that it's difficult to create them in laboratories. Other blockbuster findings from Juno concern Jupiter's moons. The probe's reconnaissance of two icy orbs—the pockmarked Ganymede and the ocean-concealing Europa (the target of a recently launched NASA habitability mission)—created breathtaking portraits of these dynamic worlds while also revealing some unusual chemistries. But a moon named Io got most of Juno's attention—and, consequently, generated the most shocking surprise. 'Io is a very peculiar moon because it's the most volcanic body of all,' Mura says. Its surface, an amalgam of burnt orange, sickly yellow and crimson hues, is covered in rocky cauldrons filled with lava, as well as volcanoes whose explosions propel magmatic matter into space. Up there the material is ionized by sunlight before plunging into Jupiter's skies, creating extremely bright auroral lights. Since the 1970s scientists have understood that Io's volcanism is powered by its elliptical orbit around Jupiter. When it's closer to Jupiter, it gets a bigger pull from the planet's gravity; when it's farther away, that pull is weaker. This back-and-forth kneads the moon like putty, creating tides in solid rock more than 300 feet high. All that motion creates a lot of friction, an abundance of heat—and a plethora of magma. Many thought that this mechanism, known as tidal heating, was so powerful that it created a continuous ocean of magma under the surface rather than the smaller, individual magma reservoirs that fuel Earth's volcanoes. The Galileo mission seemed to back that idea up: it detected an electrically conductive layer under Io's crust suggestive of a magma sea. But when Juno flew perilously close to Io on two occasions, getting within 900 miles of the violent surface, it found no trace of a shallow magma ocean. Mura now suspects Io's magma is partitioned into a maze of rocky tunnels, occasionally bubbling up into open rocky maws wherever the tunnels reach the surface. Nobody knows for sure; in typical Juno style, the observations have raised more questions than answers. But at least while scientists ponder possible solutions, they can marvel at Io's unbound ferocity. 'We discovered the largest eruption ever recorded,' Bolton says. In December 2024 Juno's infrared instrument detected a heat spike in the moon's southern hemisphere that briefly blinded the spacecraft's JIRAM instrument: a paroxysmal outpouring of lava spread over 40,000 square miles, enough to cover a quarter of California. It's producing more energy than the total annual energy output of humanity. 'And we still see it going on,' Bolton adds. By all accounts, Juno should be dead by now. The radiation should have already broken it or at least one of its instruments. Somehow it lasted well beyond its prime mission timeline, which ended in 2021. If an additional three-year extension is approved, Juno could get a better look at the planet's ghostly ring system, and some of its lesser-known innermost moons. But there's no telling how long the aging spacecraft could survive. 'It could grow old, and something could fail,' Bolton says. Perhaps 'the radiation will kill something so important that we can't function anymore.' Whenever the vehicle's end comes, it will go out in flames, spiraling toward the gas giant it spent its entire life interrogating. 'Eventually Juno will crash into Jupiter on its own,' Bolton says. But the spacecraft's legacy is already clear. Juno revealed Jupiter to be a far more confounding place than anyone dared imagine, forcing scientists to throw out reams of outdated ideas about planetary formation. It's also revealed how future spaceflight missions can defend themselves from the worst radiation in the solar system. The Juno team, having emulated its namesake's god-defying powers, is openly proud, Becker says. 'What an amazing success story for NASA.' Solve the daily Crossword

Milky Way to remain visible in August across US. Here's when, how to see our galaxy
Milky Way to remain visible in August across US. Here's when, how to see our galaxy

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Milky Way to remain visible in August across US. Here's when, how to see our galaxy

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