Short answers, pulled from the story.
The chimpanzee's closest living relative is the human. DNA sequencing shows that Pan is a sister taxon to the human lineage, with chimpanzee and human genetic code sequences differing by only 1.2%. When entire DNA strands are examined, including non-coding material, differences increase to almost 15%.
Between roughly 172,700 and 299,700 chimpanzees are estimated to be living in the wild, down from about one million in the early 1900s. The IUCN lists the species as endangered, and the western chimpanzee subspecies is classified as Critically Endangered, with an estimated 21,300 to 55,600 individuals remaining.
Chimpanzees have used stone tools for at least 4,300 years, based on archaeological evidence. A chimpanzee from the Kasakela community was the first nonhuman animal recorded making a tool, modifying a twig to extract termites from their mound.
Allen and Beatrix Gardner spent 51 months in the 1960s teaching American Sign Language to a chimpanzee named Washoe, who was reported to have learned over 350 signs. However, Herbert Terrace and psycholinguist Thomas Bever re-evaluated later research on a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky in 1979 and concluded that the apes' signing could be explained by experimenter prompting rather than genuine language acquisition.
Ham was the first great ape in space, launched aboard the Mercury-Redstone 2 capsule on the 31st of January 1961 and survived the suborbital flight. Enos flew on Mercury-Atlas 5 on the 29th of November 1961, becoming the third primate to orbit Earth after Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov.
HIV-1, the more virulent class of the virus, evolved from a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIVcpz) found in the chimpanzee subspecies P. t. troglodytes of southern Cameroon. Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, holds the greatest known genetic diversity of HIV-1, suggesting the virus has been present there longer than anywhere else.