what a payout told us so for more than a month he's been practicing his endorse shots adding to this all in one. show watching the news from berlin remember you can get the latest headlines on the new app on a website dot com from me christine went to and the team thank you for joining us for back with more news at the top of the hour. the. go beyond. soledad. we're all about the stories that. i'm doing. whatever it takes. no running no such. thing good looking no good job you made for mines.

if you're a jew good for. the kids not just cats and dogs that's. a surprising number of other animals too too when you start to consider weird sorts of behavior exhibited by with lots of kinds of animals who suddenly realize that things like play. occur all over the animal kingdom and animals who play with some unlikely friends. including us there is something in our deeply rooted nature that is able to communicate with a whole range of light from this i was part of play is deeply embedded in our nature to have the most to death use this news in the world with flooding and we're playing more than any other species if you're longer it turns out play has huge benefits for our brains. and if it's risky play even better.

it happened almost without any noticeable. over the past 30 years outdoor play began to disappear from the lives of children in north america and europe. today kids in the u.k. spend as much time outside as their parents did. technology seems to be everyone's new playmate. and it's a trend that has many explains where especially as evidence from the animal world shows that physical play has the potential to make us smarter braver maybe even kinder. really cookie you ready. stuart brown is the grandfather of play research he's been promoting its benefits for more

than 50 years if you look at the overall place of play in the world in animal play you begin to see that it is as present as sleep and dreams brown says the instinct to play is an important part of the animal evolution so important is a file in language that goes with. 12 dogs want to play what you see is dog dog play language if it was aggressive and they were fighting they have an entirely different body language. and that's boss left paws slap which is typical play activity from a dog. part of an animal played the part of the reason it is so compelling is that it's pure and everybody gets a look at that but. you know it's instinctive and we're wired the same way you know

same same part of our body. brown has gathered overwhelming evidence that there's a lot more to play than exercise for the body it's also exercise for the mind one of the things that keeps play going that they know how to do instinctively they will keep the play going without one dominating the other and that is one of the essences of play it's infectious here we got 4 of them down here we go. we may recognize you cannot. but what exactly is. he took gordon burkhardt to figure that out he studies animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective highly primarily a reptile if ologist reptile behavior person and god always like snakes and lizards

and turtles and years ago articles can play and i thought well i never even saw and if you don't consider playing a. scientists have known for a long time that mammals and birds play recognizing play in an animal that moves slowly is a lot trickier. it's a dog's waking its tail or monkeys or chips responded to tickling him so want some we can easily identify who that is playful pleasurable fun for the animal it's hard to do that with a turtle. so we need more objective criteria. and i came up with 5 different groups and it's a 5 criteria of play. to qualify as playing a behavior must be done for apparent reason 2. it has to be done over

and over again. sometimes in an exaggerated way. it's spontaneous. and the animal has to be doing it when it's not stressed. burghardt 'd came up with his criterion after discovering reptiles are capable of play. i grow. out is going to go back and maybe grab something in my pocket that they like to do . he identified play behavior in the largest lizard in the world that deadly komodo dragon. vick bring our water buffalo.

well sometimes play is confusion exploration. one of the. ways of difference is that admiration just checking out something what you do with it now play. if you go. reptiles operate a little slower pace than we do but she has all the elements this is behavior that is part of their normal repertoire she'll do this over and over again. its behavior

in an animal that we consider in us relaxed state it's a behavior that is voluntary another confusion maybe well maybe animals this stupid enough to think this fool and it's acting as if it's prey that is clearly not the case either because the try to eat the. following birds are scientists have learned the only kinds of creatures play. even fish it seems to enjoy an occasional game of golf. scientists continue to be surprised not just by which animals play but who they play with for instance the giant pacific octopus. it's generally a loner. a year ago seattle became this one's new home. and

the place where you'd meet unexpected for. just watching an octopus movie is so graceful and so beautiful you can spend so much time just sitting there and watching them and just being mesmerized by the way that they move and they interact with their environment. or. enclosure. we take care of. so it's kind of a day to day. one day housekeeping turned into something. it began with the simple task of cleaning the windows so we get water from the top of our there and we have to clean those off so that we can provide a good viewing experience for the public and i was up there spraying it off with

a hose. and the animal started to reach out of the water and kind of grab for the fresh water that was. unusual have never seen that before and so i actually just went ahead and sprayed the animal with. the animal completely with upside down and just started to come out of the water kind of move around and hung around for a couple minutes. i mean there's a lot of animals that have no interest in humans whatsoever and actively some away from you but these animals come to us. each time the spray. the octopus would score. so.

what is the power play the difference the power to bridge the divide between a solitary sea creature and a human being. type of questions that we really don't have answers to and show that there is something in there are deeply rooted nature. and is able to communicate in some level with a whole range of life on us on his planet. thanks to cell phone cameras and social media we're seeing a lot more evidence of interest species play. and sometimes it's between the most surprising playmates. the impulse to have fun seems to cross all kinds of boundaries in the animal kingdom.

at a zoo in germany there's a whole community of animals renowned for playing together. and it isn't just the young ones who monkey around in. the italian primatologist elisabet apology has come here to take a close look at this endangered species are our closest living relatives and they can give us a lot of information about the evolution of our behavior she's intrigued because these animals aren't just playful they're peaceful unlike other primates they've never been known to kill each other when 2 different communities of chimpanzees meet together they don't really fight but i know both great. 2

2 2 play is a 3rd they see it in that indefinable society it is a if they call to explore toward. 2 2 2 2 play create a stronger bond it and if we share strong bonded with your group they say you have much more chance to survive and to get the rest are sunni. it is important for the development of social skills of youngsters because they acquire social competence 2 2. if you want to believe in a social group it is important to this crucial that you perceive the emotion of the other. out. pledges team is trying to figure out just how well but no bows can read one another's feelings and whether it could be the secret to how well they play

together. they use avatars to get the. yawning off to you see someone else yawn is a telltale sign of empathy humans start doing this at around the age of 4. scientists call it emotional contagion if you are in fact that by me making another action of a group base you can't recreate the same an ocean so it is an emotional linkage between subsets. so in that you only video you can find an avatar joining a lot in different was the sunny front in the latter season diagnoses and animal respond. it can take a while but there were no booze mimic the young many times during the study.

could it be their ability to read faces that enables them to get along so well. it's difficult to understand if empathy is at the basis of play or play is that the basis of empathy and the development of empathy back to we can say yes we we we have a 1st date that suggests that this behavior called a reality. it's a common theory that young animals play to prepare for adult life but a possible connection between play and compassion is one of many hidden benefits science has started to uncover. it's no wonder scientists used to think play was nothing more than practice consider how much fun children have playing with grownup tools. but a recent study shows kittens who play it. necessarily. as

a. cubs romp in the den with their siblings yet generally they live once they mature. clearly. than meets the eye. jonathan pruitt has had his eye on a particular kind of spider the social spider since he was a graduate student in tennessee i'm interested in social spiders because tiny little predators that no one knows anything about real at least normal people don't know that they're even a thing. there are spiders that work in concert to make giant webs together capture pray together and very to his offspring and there are only about 20 species of social spider on earth out of the maybe $50000.00 species fighter that have been described so far so the sort of evolutionary novelty item.

pruitt and his colleagues were especially interested in the kind of dating game the social spiders play. mature males recruit to the observed in mature females who aren't mature yet they can't mate and these males will do their part just a little courtship dances for the female. but then the females respond to this courtship dance by approaching the male assuming a posture of receptivity the male just puts his genitals on the outside of the female genitals and then just sits there and over and over there they are just attempting this copula where posture and they could be off spending their time doing other things like getting through or playing down more silk to protect to protect them from predators. and so i thought oh it's sort of like gaining experience for later on in life that might be pertinent like motor skills or or are

social skills social intelligence and then later on as i conducted morris that is i just became more more comfortable with thinking yeah actually this is kind of behavior we're seeing in a spider might just be play. pruitt fim studied hundreds of spiders to find out why they would behave in this particular way so i figure out the consequences of his behavior by manipulating these individuals ability to engage in the behavior i love some individuals to engage in almost sex in his little plastic cups and then others that are prevented from ever having those experiences. and one of the interesting things that i found is that females that had had experience in gauging in place sex early on in life produced heavier egg cases later on and that that affects scaled to how much experience they had the more experience in play these females had the larger edge cases not

only do playful females have more young they live longer and they're less aggressive they're much less likely to kill their partners after mating something that's common in the extraordinary world that spiders. when you start to consider weird sorts of behavior exhibited by lots of kinds of animals you suddenly realize that things like play occur all over the animal kingdom and that it might not be such a sophisticated thing that's in demick or unique to people or or mammals that it might be something that has very deep evolutionary roots. it was in western canada where researchers made one of the biggest discoveries about the purpose of play. they took a close look at the behavior of young domesticated rats. australia neuroscientist serge palace explains what these animals are up to while most of us

are sleeping tracing off the one and one animal tries to get up to the other ones. and they roll over to be offended and you see that they both take turns at doing this behavior. researchers wanted to see what would happen if the young brats were raised with no one to play with you know alternative rearing condition we have a juvenile growing up with an adult and adult rats don't like playing with juveniles so they will hang around together though groom one another sleep next to one another but i want to gauge in rough and tumble play that the juveniles day i and i know. the play deprived rats fail to develop social skills including the ability to play

normally with one another. at the end if the experiment the brains from the play deprived rats were closely examined. the part responsible for decision making and impulse control was underdeveloped so he was the set of experiments where we actually shot it is play changing the prefrontal cortex and then old these changes we've seen much to play deprived is because of this trying to in the prefrontal cortex. not only was the prefrontal cortex different some of the actual nerve cells they appeared disorganized compared to regular cells this was the biggest discovery that surge palace's career but it left him with a nagging wary i grew up in a suburb in melbourne the strike and about a mile straight down from my straight was a river valley lots of greenery lots of slopes to tumble down lots of places to

hide create games with your friends it was fantastic and one of the shocking things that i found a suitable my wife and i came to lift bridge is we sold to the coolidge a river valley look fantastic and the thing that shocked us both was where all the kids. my concern is that the gnawing young children below can drink i can play has led to them not dating the cons of experiences that actually prepare them to be able to deal effectively in an unpredictable world that . there are several studies that track things like how frequent is depression in childhood how frequent is like a pathology and that's been going like this so you have the plight coming down of this and all these mental health things going up what is at the university of tennessee researchers are taking pelisse is work

a step further. they're looking into the connection between play and the ability to deal with life's hard knocks. these are syrian hamsters they're about a month old and about a month old is their peak time social play and their social play is rough and tumble mock aggression where they will roll around in each other and rustle. along at them. and one way to initiate play is when another animal approaches and rolls over on his back and they roll into a play fight or go there is a push. you can see that one animal initially and then it ran away and he came back and he attacked the other and this was roles. really as play fighting.

play it has several functions but one is to allow for development of the prefrontal cortex and so we were interested in is their ability to cope with stress and it all have because we know the brain cortex is important for stress. one normal adult has been placed into the home of another adult don't play in fighting they actually fight these animals usually live alone so the battle can get vicious. the own caged animal will defend its territory against the intruder and attack. so you can see the time from the side just like a play fight but in adults it's not playful and they continue to try to a seriously attack each other. the loser suffers what's called a social defeat. a normal hamster will get over it and go on to fight another day. ok there you go ok

a play deprived hamster that loses is less resilient. the next time it's in a fight it will be submissive. and what we have here is a play deprived animal in his home cage and we put in a smaller non-threatening animal into the cage we allow for social interaction. and a play deprived animals respond with a great deal of anxiety and fear they might go and sniff the other animal and then run away and that's our index of social anxiety. whether it's unique animal world or in the schoolyard play helps us prepared to cope with lights ups and downs but the way children play has changed dramatically. a generation ago it didn't take much to have fun

a piece of rope. a few tweaks. children in the united states now spends less time outdoors than any previous generation that means 47 minutes a day a free play outside versus 7 that a half hours in front of a screen. and they're missing out on a lot more than just fresh air and exercise. she would brown recognize the fight will roll of play long before it was a respected area of science. back then play was considered trivial an extravagance that kids didn't really have to have and slowly the science and the understanding of play behavior itself has burgeoned over the years

we've begun to see play as a whole very differently brown went on to review the played backgrounds of more than 6000 people. they confirmed what he 1st thought that having fun is actually a very serious matter. what you find is that it's necessary for a sense of optimism fulfillment for a sense of competency for sense of an authentic self these are all components the play produces and many more for the wellbeing of individuals. i'm very concerned. we have a real crisis. while play deprivation may be only one factor the world health organization says the mental health of young people is declining in europe for example one in 5

kids is dealing with developmental emotional or behavioral problems. one in 8 is mentally ill. you know. already. one of the leading advocates of outdoor play is canada's mariana. and they depict that hard world and she started out as an injury prevention researcher focusing on sure what is weighted up again but she came to realize safety experts were overlooking something crucial part of it was having my own kids i think that that influences everybody to such a large extent. i actually started to read the literature as a developmental psychologist what is the role of risk in children's lives and what

i read blew my mind you had very different disciplines all coming to the same conclusion that engaging in risk was actually a very important aspect of preventing injuries thanks a lot of history if you think about kids taking risks and engaging in risky play they're learning how their body works they're learning what they're comfortable with they're learning how the world works they're learning very fundamental risk management skills. it used to be common for children to muck about unsupervised doing things that might make their parents gasp. but in the 1980 s. children just covered the thrill of video games. around the same time adults began to see the outside world as a more honest place. words.

we have smartphones in our hands all the time and we're getting bombarded by these catastrophic and cataclysmic events all the time so you feel like risk is everywhere. 2 years ago persone began a national study into how different neighborhoods affect how much children go outside. this particular study deals with the built environment right so how can we include kids in the community make sure that they're comfortable playing outside whatever it is that they want to go and there's very specific things that we can do to design a community to make kids want to play outside and to make parents feel comfortable letting them play outside. of kelly an 11 year old participant is fitted with a g.p.s. watch and then accelerometer. what you see here is the data from names watch from one of the instances where she would have been playing outside in the little point

that's running around is her activity over that time span. so we've got her here she's probably at home and she's just leaving her house and then she's going off to another bit of green space over here where she's hanging out and she's exploring quite a bit of that area she's actually covering a good chunk of her neighborhood and spending time in lots of different types of renesmee i think that i like to play more and if we turn back the centuries like a century years like 1020 years ago i think i'd fit in more. but i like like i've always like. the past. it seems the freedom to be active outdoors also free the imagination. you got to be really really really careful and so that's where it becomes important to point out ok so these are the kinds of limitations that your are putting on your

child in order to avoid them you know being out on their own i like playing in bushes or s. climbing climbing. way it's between a very very very unlikely event versus something that could fundamentally influence your child's health and well. persona as early days as a show children especially girls play outside much more when they're unsupervised the fact that we found an activity where girls are more physically active is an incredibly important finding and so what is it that we can do to promote girls getting outside playing unsupervised rather than seeing that level off once they hit early adolescence and so all of this is suggesting that to be able to

be independent and get out there and determine what they want to do is having important influences on this generation's feelings of self competence of resilience of anxiety of depression you know all of those really important markers of well being. norway is a land of dramatic beauty where people have a deep connection from nature. but even here traditional play started to decline. ellen's and set her plans to change that one playground at a time well. i'm fine how are you my and she's collaborating with mariana persone in canada i wanted to tell you about our project and that

we have now. all our childcare centers both indoor and outdoor environments so no. yeah. wow you know. persone and fans that are a remodelling playground in 8 child care centers with the goal of making them more thrilling playgrounds here started to be changed everything was kind of shrunk in a way because they were supposed to be. more safe the new designs will be based on sand setters pioneering research she was the one who pinpointed the features of what's called risky play.

some setter was one of the 1st researchers to talk to children about their favorite play. preschoolers like the ones at this outdoor childcare center offer a perspective that's often forgotten usually if you ask people where did you live to play and what did you play when you were young most of the time they mention

being in the outdoors in the chair. so it's kind of interesting and a lot of parents own children do the same thing we've had this kind of preschool 'd for many many years but lost their kids it's been growing in number and i think that's more kind of a reaction to society where a lot of our life is. spending more time indoors. you know on digital devices and t.v. and things like that. play. the most important thing for children. playing children important way of being. and also social skills being together with the children

problem solving. is where they learn. what makes it different from other kinds of play is that it is a chance for getting injured that is probably the thing that we are afraid of. it's includes uncertainty maybe something that you are a little bit scared about doing but still it's testing also their environment and themselves. you can look at whisky play as a as a way to have be true eat your fear so true play where children naturally engaging climbing in gauging testing their ability to manage hearts they are actually learning how to handle it then it's nothing to fear in the more and then you are

not as afraid. as research suggests that risky play might actually help prevent this we see that it's the ones that never got the chance to experience climbing those are the ones that are more a percentage in the population with a phobia for hearts. i don't know when i started doing this research i read a lot about risky play and it was also always from the adults perspective and i wanted to talk to the children it's really something that they are experts in . it when they want. her and her. and the striking thing was

that all of them talked about bodily feelings. they usually said it tickles in my tummy my heart goes like boing boing boing and all of it was very positive but still they talked about the fear being there are the anxiety of being there because they did something that was scary but their word of it you know which was. there and direct interested in english that is scary for me. sam said her is part of a growing network of experts i think keeping for every child's right to take part in risky play. i'm very happy for having parents that allowed me to explore and to climb trees and to jump down from hides and build things and crawl under things and all those things that children want to do.

the time may be running out many children are growing up today with parents who have few memories of the pleasures of the worse. if they don't have that frame of reference it's much harder for them to realize what's missing. because this started in the late eighty's those people are now parents and we could have a collective intergenerational kind of memory fog that white so that idea as kind of a normal part of childhood. traditionally kids remote free. country school age kids whereas now the reason the sense of that sense of freedom and i think with that there's a huge loss. a return to more outdoor play would reconnect just one of the most

significant aspects of our animal nature. it also promises to restore the emotional benefits that we've only begun to record as if they're slipping away we have an industrial revolution back around where productivity and being honored and loved for your personal productivity is more important than your happiness or your fulfillment. so i think we've got an uphill fight to get plenty into the consciousness of the culture what i mean gauging imply or watch to engaging in fire i watch out i can engage in play i think to myself you know this is this is not just fluff this is something that this animal has evolved to do that serves some purpose that is rather significant component of this things life. was new for tech children from every possible danger they're not going to be very

resilient or very able to cope just like animals hotaru for peer to deal with uncertainties so to people all mammals have basically the same brain structure we've now made the connection that a lack of p. apply translates into i'm not normally but the prefrontal cortex so now all of sudden you look at the kid scenario and you go well if it's true on rats maybe those correlations in children are in fact closer. and my concern has always been is this a good thing to prevent young children from freely choosing to engage in whatever kind of play they want with if he is. the most important thing we can do is just get out of the way and let them play let them play how they choose to provide. an environment they feel comfortable playing with and then just get out of. luck

and figure it out for themselves bellamy. go to india. the world has a bit less plastic when tableware is edible. and afghan women refugees have jobs. this is what the drug is doing. it's a project started by students in new delhi and being sorry but i'm still in that idea so for swing votes are. being 30 minutes on d w. board. the

global corona crisis you can find more information online d.w. dot com and on t.w. social media channels. crime fighters are back africa's most successful radio drama series g. when you spoke this season the story's focus on hate speech prevention and sustainable production. olympus odes are available online and of course you can share and discuss on africa's facebook page and other social media platforms. crime fighters tune in now.

this is the news coming to you live from berlin the whole trial freezes funding for the world health organization the u.s. president accuses it of covering up the spread of the corona virus and met mismanaging its response to the pandemic also coming up the european commission's president offers guidance to member states on how they should start lifting their coronavirus. restrictions have been necessary says 1st of all they're lying but they come at a enormous price. at a sad anniversary in paris has exactly.