The country that brings you bullfighting is expected to pass a law that will guarantee Apes Rights.

In Spain, if the resolution passes, it’ll be illegal to experiment on apes or use them in circuses, commercials or movies.

“This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity,” said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.

I have no idea exactly what the above quote means.

Separately, our Jeanna Bryner reported last month, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France has been asked to grant human rights to Matthew, a 26-year-old chimp. Not just any ol’ rights, but human rights. Hmm. Matthew does look like he’s pondering all this..

A list of biologists long enough to choke a horse has completed a new tree of life for animals, resolving the evolutionary relationships among all the major groups and suggesting some weird things about the origins of animals with well-developed tissues.

This was the surprise tissue finding — comb jellyfish (jellies with well-developed tissues) diverged from other animals even before the lowly sponge, which has no tissue to speak of.

Either comb jellies evolved their complexity independently from other animals or sponges became greatly simplified through the course of evolution, said study co-author Casey Dunn of Brown University.

If corroborated, “this would significantly change the way we think about the earliest multicellular animals,”  Dunn said. The results are detailed in the March 6 issue of the journal Nature.

These gigantic trees of life (this one is said to be the most comprehensive animal tree of life to date) require massive computer power to run algorithms and resolve huge matrices of data into the simplest and best explanation for evolutionary relationships. The animal tree demanded the power of more than 120 processors housed in computer clusters in labs around the globe.

The new tree also shows that millipedes and centipedes are more closely related to spiders than to insects. The pedes-spiders relationship shows it counts when you have a leg up on things.

A lot of grown-ups are packing up today as the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting shuts down in Boston, but earlier in the six-day conference, the halls also were populated by a hordes of science-minded 4th graders.

Or they might have been 3rd graders, but anyhow, they were definitely about 9 years old and smarter than a lot of folks on Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”

The local school kids were here as part of the AAAS’s Public Science Day, and the session I visited was focused on educating some 300 students about spiders.

“Ew,” came the muffled reply from some of the pizza-chomping, juicebox-swilling children as AAAS’s Media Programs Director Bob Hirshon tried to introduce the topic of spiders above the lunchtime din.

But he quickly launched a Spider Trivia contest, and the kids’ competitive curiosity surged.  Test yourself on some of the questions most of the kids aced (they had multiple choice options to choose from, not shown here):

How many named spider species are currently known to scientists? (40,000)

What is the largest known spider species? (the male Goliath bird-eating spider)

Can spiders live underwater? (yes, consider the water spider of central and northern Europe.)

Can spiders live in the Arctic? (true, 70 spider species live in Greenland alone.)

How long do female tarantulas live? (25 or more years)

Is all spider venom harmful to humans (no. Most spider venom is harmless to humans.)

And finally, what was the name of the giant spider in Lord of the Rings? (Shelob)

As humans, we tend to get pretty boastful about our status on this earth. We put people on the moon, we treat and cure diseases, we invent weapons just in case we want to blow each other into oblivion one day. Clearly, it is our enormous brain power that sets us apart from the pack - or is it? Are we that much smarter than other animals?

A program airing tomorrow night on PBS entitled “Ape Genius” explores that notion, offering a challenge to our cranial cockiness. The show investigates all the different ways our ape cousins - Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Orangutans and Bonobos - have demonstrated amazing intelligence, both in the wild and in captivity and, judging by the preview, you should prepare to be humbled. There’s the chimpanzee group just chilling in a pond after a busy day of hunting with homemade spears and the bonobo who can “talk”, among others.

“Ape Genuis” couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. Just recently, gorillas were caught doing very human things in the Republic of Congo, a few years after studies confirmed they also use tools. All this from an ape thought to be “less human” than chimpanzees, even. Clearly, there are fewer differences between us and the dwindling ape species of Africa than once thought, but perhaps what is more interesting is that even as we lose ticks in the column of distinctly human traits, we’re still separated from apes by an intelligence gulf miles wide created by just a few tiny dial-turns in our DNA. So what DOES make us human?

Booger is dead but not gone.

A company called RNL Bio plans to clone the pit bull using tissue taken from its ear before it died. A California woman will pay $150,000 for what’s being billed as the first order for pet dog cloning, the BBC reports.

The cloning will be done at Seoul National University, where the first cloned dog, Snuppy, was created in 2005.

Booger’s owner, Bernann McKunney, “is said to have been particularly attached to the dog, after it saved her life when another dog attacked her and bit off her arm,” according to the BBC report.

Rovers all over, meanwhile, are getting stem cell therapy, another thing we’re skittish about applying to humans.

Eager to take a look at a super-secret U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite?

Now you can thumb through a sourcebook on a Russian satellite tracking facility in Siberia called the Altay Optical Laser Research Center.

Allan Thomson, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst prepared the Russian/English language sourcebook that spotlights the Russian ground equipment capable of cranking out images of high-flying spacecraft.

The sourcebook contains shot-from-the-ground adaptive optics imagery, albeit a bit blurry, of Russian spacecraft, several NASA Earth observing satellites…as well as the NRO’s Lacrosse 2 spysat lofted back in 1991.

Lacrosse (see image) uses powerful cloud-cutting radar for day/night surveillance tasks.

BTW: A second Russian site will be equipped next year with a more powerful satellite-imaging telescope, hardware generally seen similar to a facility the United States operates in Hawaii. That upcoming satellite-scanning, sky-watching Russian equipment is to be located within Savvushka, Zmeinogorskigy area, the Altai territory, according to the sourcebook.

The sourcebook was made available today by Secrecy News from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.

Go to:

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/track/altay.pdf

It isn’t exactly raining iguanas, but the chill in Florida is causing the tree-dwelling creatures to fall to the ground.

Though they lie on the ground looking dead, most aren’t, according to this Miami Herald article.

”We have found dozens on the bike path after a major cold snap,” said Robert Yero, park manager at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park. “When they warm up in the sun, they come back to life.”

Perfect time to bring up the question: Can it rain fish?

A dramatic shark photo making the rounds on the Web today is not new. But it’s very cool.

The image shows a great white shark stalking a kayaker off the coast of South Africa. In the kayak is marine biologist Trey Snow. The photo, which was first published in Africa Geographic in 2005, was taken by Thomas P. Peschak, who “tied myself to the tower of the research boat Lamnidae and leaned into the void, precariously hanging over the ocean while waiting patiently for a white shark to come along.” Today the Daily Mail’s web site ran the photo as though it were recent.

The drama in captured in the photo [see it here] is nothing compared to what Peschak and Snow must have felt. Here’s what Peschak said of the moments leading up to the snapshot:

“When the first shark of the day came across our sea kayak it dove to the seabed and inspected it from below. I quickly trained my camera on the dark shadow which slowly transformed from diffuse shape into the sleek outline of a large great white.”

See also our image gallery of great whites, and vote for your favorite shark.

Oh, and you have to see the video of tourists swimming with whale sharks.

If you have trouble finding your cat at night, perhaps a designer fluorescent cat would be the pet for you.

South Korean researchers say they’ve cloned cats by manipulating a certain gene that happens to deal with some otherwise inhibited fluorescence. The side effect: the cats “glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.”

Other than the novelty, why should we care?

“The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as human,” officials said in a statement.

See other glowing research results as you vote for the Freakiest Lab Animal.

A new species of spitting cobra, discovered in Kenya, is some 9 feet long.

The finding “reinforces the obvious—that there have to be many other unreported species but hundreds are being lost as their habitats disappear under the continued mismanagement of our planet,” said Kenyan environmentalist Richard Leakey in a story on MSNBC.

On a more personally urgent matter for anyone confronting one of these large snakes: They’re known to aim for the eyes.