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This may or may not be news for all of you. Still, some of the more linguistically / AI-oriented readers may have been aware of Alex the parrot. Alex was ... really quite impressive; he lived and worked with an animal psychologist named Irene Pepperberg for over thirty years, and in that time demonstrated the most advanced understanding of language ever seen outside the higher primates. His vocabulary was a little over 100 words, but more interestingly, he seemed to actually understand what he was saying (to a certain extent - his conversations were symbolic and comprehensible, if not English per se).
On the 7th of September, he died unexpectedly in what could be considered middle age for his species. The research in which he assisted has benefited mentally-handicapped people (by developing a communication model that can be used with only partial understanding) and advanced human understanding of language and linguistic processing by a considerable amount. He was not human, and to anthropomorphise him would be wrong, but I am of the opinion that his death is still a great loss, since another twenty or thirty years of Alex-based research could have had some very interesting results indeed.
Alex: 1976-2007