Amazon Prime Day is live. See the best deals HERE. Plus landmine-detecting rats and other weird things we learned this week. Let's talk about (ratfish) sex, baby. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. What's the weirdest thing you learned this week?

The'drunken monkey hypothesis' could explain why humans like alcohol so much. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Scientists know that humans might not be as exceptional in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom as we long thought. For example, whale songs and bonobo calls have features similar to language, and bonobos might even know when someone is ignorant about something. In fact, new research suggests that studying animals can provide insight into the evolution of our own species.

Clever Hans, a performing horse, drew amazed crowds wherever he went. With his owner Wilhelm, a maths teacher, he put on incredible displays of arithmetic, beating out the answer to sums with his hooves. Hans even appeared to be able to read, though sceptics insisted the horse was merely responding to signals given by Wilhelm, touring Germany before the First World War. However the trick was done, neither the animal nor the teacher would have been surprised by news this month that horses are more intelligent than previously guessed. Researchers at Nottingham Trent University taught 20 horses to touch cards with their noses in return for treats.

Chimpanzees get more selective over who they associate themselves with as they age, new research reveals. In a study spanning two decades in a Ugandan national park, US experts observed social interactions among 21 wild male chimps, ranging in age from 15 to 58 years. Both chimps and humans prefer to be around the company of old friends and spend less time among new faces, the experts conclude. Ageing male chimps have more mutual and positive friendships than younger chimps, who have more one-sided, antagonistic relationships. Chimps also showed a shift from negative interactions to more positive ones as they reached their twilight years, 'like humans looking for some peace and quiet'.

I have a strong feeling that Julia will eventually oust Python for data science and artificial intelligence. The reason is this, speed and distributed computing. Python is an excellent language, even if you are not from a computing background and want to write programs, Python is a good language to start. But Julia has the following advantages. Julia is super fast, even compared to C it has very simmilar speed with far less complicated syntax.

In the 1920s, the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov used artificial insemination to breed a'humanzee' – a cross between a human and our closest relative species, the chimpanzee. Given the moral quandaries a humanzee might create, we can be thankful that Ivanov failed: when the winds of Soviet scientific preferences changed, he was arrested and exiled. But Ivanov's endeavour points to the persistent, post-Darwinian fear and fascination with the question of whether humans are a creature apart, above all other life, or whether we're just one more animal in a mad scientist's menagerie. Humans have searched and repeatedly failed to rescue ourselves from this disquieting commonality. Numerous dividers between humans and beasts have been proposed: thought and language, tools and rules, culture, imitation, empathy, morality, hate, even a grasp of'folk' physics. But they've all failed, in one way or another. I'd like to put forward a new contender – strangely, the very same tendency that elicits the most dread and excitement among political and economic commentators today.

In the 1920s, the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov used artificial insemination to breed a'humanzee' – a cross between a human and our closest relative species, the chimpanzee. Given the moral quandaries a humanzee might create, we can be thankful that Ivanov failed: when the winds of Soviet scientific preferences changed, he was arrested and exiled. But Ivanov's endeavour points to the persistent, post-Darwinian fear and fascination with the question of whether humans are a creature apart, above all other life, or whether we're just one more animal in a mad scientist's menagerie. Humans have searched and repeatedly failed to rescue ourselves from this disquieting commonality. Numerous dividers between humans and beasts have been proposed: thought and language, tools and rules, culture, imitation, empathy, morality, hate, even a grasp of'folk' physics. But they've all failed, in one way or another. I'd like to put forward a new contender – strangely, the very same tendency that elicits the most dread and excitement among political and economic commentators today. We lost our exclusive position in the animal kingdom, not because we overestimated ourselves, but because we underestimated our cousins.

Even in retirement, Chimp the robot's still got it. The giant red humanoid crouches down like a Transformer to roll on all fours, then stands up and slowly approaches a door. It sees its world by coating it in lasers, allowing Chimp to reach for the handle, delicately turn it, and roll through the entry. Two and a half years after Chimp competed in the Darpa Robotics Challenge, it remains one of the weirdest humanoid robots on Earth. But that weirdness is Chimp's strength.

Since the 1920's, some researchers and studies have suggested that chimps are'super strong' compared to humans. These past studies implied that chimps' muscle fibers - the cells that make up muscles - are superior to humans'. But a new study has found that contrary to this belief, a chimp muscles' power output is just about 1.35 times higher than human muscle of similar size - a difference the researchers call'modest' compared with historical, popular accounts of chimp'super strength' being many times stronger than humans. When all factors were integrated in a computer model, chimp muscle produces about 1.35 times more dynamics force and power than human muscle Dr Brian Umberger, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a co-author of the study, said that the researchers found that this modest performance advantage wasn't actually due to strong muscle fibers found in chimpanzees compared to humans - but due to the different mix of muscle fibers found in chimpanzees compared to humans. According to the authors of the research, if the long-standing, untested assumption about chimpanzee's exceptional strength was true, it'would indicate a significant and previously unappreciated evolutionary shift in the force and/or power-producing capabilities of skeletal muscle' in either chimps or humans, whose lines diverged about 7 or 8 million years ago.

Ravens have long been said to posses impressive intelligence and it seems they also remember people who treat them unfairly. Researchers have found that the creatures could recall trainers who gave them a raw deal by stealing their food up to a month later. The findings add to a growing understanding of the highly intelligent behaviour demonstrated by the corvid family of birds, which includes crows, ravens, magpies and others. Researchers from the University of Vienna have found that ravens (pictured) can remember being conned by human trainers up to a month after they last had contact. A group of ravens were trained to trade chunks of bread for lumps of cheese.