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Reuters is reporting that the aerospace arm of Iran's defense ministry has successfully launched a monkey into space and retrieved it alive, thereby pushing Iran's young space program leaps and bounds forward, all the way into the 1950s. We would say welcome to the party, Iran, but frankly, the idea of you having rockets really just makes everyone uncomfortable, so... come in if you have to, I guess?

Look, we've all been there -- you find yourself needing a new bookcase, so you decide to head to the local IKEA to purchase some new shelves, and maybe grab a couple of tasty meatballs while you're at it. In the rush of excitement of shopping for new furniture, though, you accidentally leave your pet monkey behind. Happens to the best of us, right? OK, on second thought, maybe that's not a series of events that you're familiar with, but at least one Canadian shopper presumably is, judging by the rhesus macaque monkey found wandering a Toronto IKEA yesterday afternoon. Lest we neglect the most important part of this story, we now direct you attention to the monkey's little coat, because OH MY GOD YOU GUYS LOOK AT HIS LITTLE COAT!!!

In 2010, the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey was introduced to science and added to the list of primates that live in the Kachin state region of Burma, near China. However, that description came from a dead specimen from a local hunter. No one had seen a live  snub-nosed monkey before, until a joint effort between conservation groups managed to capture the first ever images of this rare monkey.

Hack a Kinect and then use it to read your movements and make a monkey copy them: It's an idea so simple and cool that you're kicking yourself for not having come up with it. Or you did come up with it and you're kicking yourself for not doing it. Either way, Jan Sieber and Ralph Kistler did do it and it's both an awesome toy and an awesome play on words.

The way it works is that the Kinect reads and records the user's body movements and the software translates them into commands that are sent to the poor monkey's nightmarish skeletal implant made of metal, servos, and wires. Even through all that, the monkey seems to have been able to keep that little smirk on his face and will gladly do jumping jacks with you.

Video after the jump shows the monkey in action, explains the process of creation and personifies the little guy so much that the scene in which his innards are removed and replaced is genuinely disturbing. Enjoy!

Chrysler recently found itself in hot water with PETA over a recent advertisement in which the excitement of their Dodge "big tent event" was underscored by a chimp detonating a tiny explosive. PETA: "Most top ad agencies in the country won't even consider producing an ad featuring a great ape these days given the well-documented abuse that young chimpanzees and orangutans suffer in the entertainment industry."

Chrysler's response was ... creative: Rather than cutting the ad or continuing to run it as it was, they digitally edited it so that the chimp became invisible: In the edited version, we instead see just the chimp's floating, sequined tracksuit.