To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps | Hacker News Reader

To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps

nytimes.com

114 pointsjimnotgym72 comments

Don’t get me wrong, this is very interesting, but there is something very funny about the idea that “give a chimpanzee stuff and see if they like it” is academic research.

This could absolutely be a headline on The Onion.

    there is something very funny about the idea that “give a chimpanzee stuff and see if they like it”

This is the premise behind the "Ignobel prize" – awards for scientific research which at first-glance may appear to be an April Fool's prank, but genuinely advance the cause of scientific research.

    "the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza"
    "what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic"
    "some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

I love the ignoble prizes, receiving one is a bucket-list item for me! I’ll need to step up my game though and do more weird things, I’m hoping I can put this off till the last 5-10 years of my career.

That was my reaction as well, they're really shooting for an Ig Nobel with this one.

Sure seems stupid on first glance but most science seems pointless. It’s only when several loosely interconnected ideas that prove something MIGHT be commercially viable do we find out that it was the first curious question that … again seems stupid… was the seed of inivation

Some would say that science can be valuable even when it does not produce commercially viable results. Making money is not the pinnacle of human experience.

There are plenty of scientific results that make us lose money. Un-leading our paint and gasoline, climate change, even just eating fresh fruits and veg.

The main reason why the uninteresting results in science are always valuable is that negative knowledge is still knowledge. Every idea that gets kicked around and tested was something that would probably have been interesting, so knowing that it's most likely a dead end is worth knowing.

Long live the Ig Nobel Prize! I wish we had a Epic Fail prize equivalent where to honor genuinely nonsensical, failed science experiments because they're often still worth doing.

What are some examples of questions that at first seemed stupid yet became brilliant when connected with other seemingly stupid ideas?

Rather than a singular "question" that seems stupid, consider prime numbers. People toyed with prime numbers for centuries, asking all sorts of questions, with little-to-no impact on the vast majority of humans. Fast forward to the age of telecommunications: suddenly massive innovations in cryptography are being built on knowledge of prime numbers that previously was a novelty.

Yeah, math has a lot of ideas that seemed like silly puzzles when first explored. The term "imaginary numbers" was originally an insult (from Descartes!) for math involving the square root of negative numbers.

A lot of early work into physics seemed like dumb questions at the time. When taken to the extreme “Do heavy objects fall faster?” tells you quite a bit about how the world works. And critically people intuited the wrong answers to many such questions before careful experimentation.

Obviously we have the benefit of hindsight, but “do heavy objects fall faster” doesn’t seem like a stupid question to me in the same way that “do chimpanzees like crystals” does.

I think we can call them both stupid in they are malformed.

Let go of a feather and brick on the ISS gets a different result than doing so on top of Mount Everest. Similarly understanding chimpanzees behavior is a deeper question here noticing some chimps find some crystals interesting in some situations and moving on.

My understanding is that much of discrete mathematics was considered to be purely academic until computers were invented.

Microwaves were invented as hamster defrost machines. Seriously!

And it worked, but unfortunately humans are too big for it to work on us.

They were able to freeze hamsters entirely then reanimate them with a microwave.

While that sounds like an interesting tidbit, it also doesn’t appear remotely true based off of the history sections in the wiki pages for microwaves and microwave ovens.

That article is somewhat revisionist.

> In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was independently and accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer

Sure, meanwhile using microwaves to heat stuff up dates back to the 1920’s. WWII soldiers would regularly stand in front microwave equipment to warm up. The resonant-cavity magnetron was a British invention that finally made microwaves far more efficient to produce.

The story about noticing a candy bar melting in his pocket is also kind of funny as that’s what normally happens to candy bars in your pockets, further it means he didn’t notice he himself warming up.

The Tom Scott video(https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y) did a pretty good summary of the Percy Spencer microwave (a giant commercial oven) and the later parallel development by J. E. Lovelock of a small microwave to reheat small mammals for experiments with cryorevival (replacing lamps and hot paddles).

Great comment. It's bananas. Chimps like bananas too, right?

I thought it was fruit flies.

Fruit can't fly, silly

Time flies like a banana.

Imagine if monkeys could communicate using crystals. That would be interesting - human - animal language!

Research could lead into shit like cows TELLING us when feeling sick or know something etc. Food production, pets, police animals - a lot of potential uses.

The same as literally chemistry and rocks gave us transistors.

Almost no study is crazy.

Playing with glass gave us telescopes and microscopes.

"Breaking: Animals Have Preferences"

> But he’s also very interested in “the impact of crystals on the history of art and the history of mind,”

This made my eyes roll a bit.

unsurprising, since they're also into Monoliths

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHWs3c3YNs4

wait until they hear about microservices

Full article share link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/science/chimpanzees-cryst...

Share links need accounts anyway? Is this new?

"You have free access to this story. Continue reading with a Times account"

https://archive.ph/EHCxx

archive.ph isn’t working for me, but .is works

https://archive.is/EHCxx

how are you still able to access archive.ph? do we need to put something in the hosts? All I've gotten there for the last month and a half is an nginx landing page.

Avoid these sites, they use visitor browsers as a DDoS attack platform.

This, I've not heard of. Do you have a source?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740

(I don't fully understand the relationship between archive.is, archive.ph, and archive.today, but my impression is that they're all the same person.)

You're talking ** Karl, PLAY A RECORD

NYTimes competing with NYTimesPitchBot for funnier headlines, I see. What a bizarre and awesome piece of science. I like crystals for the miracle of uncountable numbers of atoms transferring symmetry from the smallest scale to the visible scale.

“While the attraction is clear, the underlying motivation is not,” he said.

Nobody involved in the study or the article has ever done even a small dose of psilocybin and interacted with crystals.

Not even the chimps.

Follow up study?

They're also into bananas

so are people! we overthrew multiple countries for banan

"Bananoi", please. They aren't Latin.

It's mentioned in the article that the chimpanzees only relinquished the crystals in exchange for many bananas, so it seems they're more into crystals...

I've often joked about inflation and that while TVs may have become inexpensive, food has not.

Are you saying that I might be able to harvest the crystals in them and pay for bananas?

What's wrong with bananas?

They're a nightmare for atheists!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfv-Qn1M58I

I thought this was going to be the amazing atheist banana clip, was pleasantly surprised to be reminded of this instead

This is clearly a parody. right? right? please say yes.

The intelligent design controversy during the mid 2000's were a fun time. I still have some Flying Spaghetti Monster merch.

Watch the last few seconds.

A sizable percentage of the human population is deathly allergic to bananas.

I'm mildly allergic to bananas, but I don't think the number of people allergic to bananas is "sizable."

My son is not, and he will let you know how not allergic he is to Bananas if he sees any that he is not eating.

And this is relevant how?

Me too.

I'd gladly trade you a banana tomorrow for a crystal today.

here is a random wierd thing about chimps that makes the whole crystal thing worth a go. I give you ,stick in ear

and worse

https://www.livescience.com/animals/land-mammals/chimps-deve...

Humans like pretty things, that’s why I have an urge to pet bears and tigers even though I know they’ll kill me.

What if you place a whole bunch of similar crystals in a pile, with only 1 or 2 smooth rocks?

I’m willing to bet they will go after the smooth rocks and it’s about rarity, not crystals.

If you read the original paper (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....) then they go into more detail on the piles of pebbles and what got taken; the graphs in figure 4 (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....) make it very obvious that the chimps loved the crystals.

(an "euhedral" crystal is one with lots of obvious facets, an "anhedral" one is one that's been rounded down into a more pebble shape.)

They had piles of average 30 rocks and 3 crystals. They do not do the inverse. They did not account fo rarity.

You have a question, a hypothesis and designed an experiment to test it.

The study had a harder question: "What properties of crystalline stones attracted them?". The abstract has this answer: "We found that transparency and geometric shape were the two attractors guiding chimpanzees."

Maybe this is scientific proof for the diamond industry.

> I’m willing to bet they will go after the smooth rocks and it’s about rarity, not crystals.

Why? Crystals are pretty, rocks are not. We clearly prefer shiny colorful things to dull beige things, even if shiny things are abundant.

Well.. Some rocks are definitely shiney. It would be interesting to see if monkeys have any affinity for well polished rocks with pretty colors. Humans do like them, maybe not as much as crystals but they're nice nonetheless.

While the ancient Romans liked transparent crystals, especially emeralds and beryls, they were not the most valued gems.

The most valued gems in Ancient Rome were the higher-quality varieties of noble opals and pearls, which are not transparent, but which show a variable play of colors, depending on the ambient light and on the angle of sight.

Damn now I want to buy a large crystal for my desk.

now give them The Orb

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