Elephants

Language processing in humans and computers: Part 2Tidying up the zoo in the morningThe first elephant in the room: The WebJust like search engines, language models process data scraped from the web. Both are built on top of web crawlers. Chatbots are children of the Web, not of expert systems.A search engine is an interface of a source index sorted by reputation. A chatbot is an interface of a language model extrapolating from the sources. Google was built on the crucial idea of reputation-based search and the crucial…

Shastri Akella’s debut novel is a tumultuous account of the India of the 1980s and 1990s, when homosexuality was punishable by a 10-year prison term. At the centre of the story is 16-year-old Shagun Mathur, who has lost his best friends – his identical twin sisters, Mud and Milk, and his long-absent father, who has returned from London six months after the twins drowned in the Bay of Bengal. The elephant in the pool (Shutterstock) 371pp, ₹599; Penguin Shagun is still trying to process the grief of Mud and…

The study has recently been published in the journal PNAS. The researchers closely examined the bones of elephants that are approximately 125,000 years old and that were discovered in Gröbern in Saxony-Anhalt and Taubach in Thuringia, Germany, decades ago. They were able to identify cut marks made by stone tools used by the Neanderthals that indicate that the animals must have been hunted before they were extensively butchered.The pelvic bone of a Palaeoloxodon antiquus found in Gröbern. Credit: Lutz Kindler, LEIZAIt was…

A recent study provides new insights into the evolution of dexterous trunks in ancestral elephants. It highlights the co-evolution of elongated mandibles and trunks in response to environmental changes, leading to the unique feeding capabilities of modern elephants.A research analysis on the development of long-nosed gomphotheres, predecessors of today’s elephants, indicates that transitioning to open-area grazing contributed to the evolution of their winding and dexterous trunks.In a study published in the journal eLife,…

Pelvic bone of a Palaeoloxodon antiquus found in Gröbern. Credit: Lutz Kindler, LEIZA Hunting the now extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) was widespread among Neanderthals, concludes a research team consisting of members of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), also based in Mainz, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The study has recently been…

A herd of elephants in Malaysia smashed up a car after it struck one of their babies on Sunday night.That (frankly understandable) response shows how the highly emotional animals will do anything to protect their own, an elephant advocate said."If you put yourself in their position, if your kid was hit by a car and you felt that people were negligent or whatever you thought, I suppose you or your family might fly into a rage or scream or shout at people also," Joyce Poole, who co-founded an elephant research and advocacy…

The largest land mammal of our time has an evolutionary story at least 60 million years in the making. On Monday, a new exhibit revealing the ‘secret lives’ of the trunked giants will open at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, clueing us into how elephants evolved, communicate, and persevere in a world increasingly dominated by humankind.What Inspired Dominic Monaghan's Performance in Moriarty?The new exhibit is entitled ‘The Secret World of Elephants’ and it walks you through elephants’ journey to become the…

India's space milestone continues as Chandrayaan-3 successfully launches on a powerful rocket and will take around a month to reach the moon. India's space mission, Chandrayaan-3, successfully launched by the mighty rocket, which also successfully launched Chandrayaan-2 over three and a half years ago. The rocket is an impressive feat of engineering, both in size and capability. It stands tall, wide, and long, requiring a complete upward gaze to take in its entirety. Developed by India's own Indian Space Research…

Even though we could, most of us don’t want to eat the same food for every meal. Now researchers have discovered it's the same for African elephants, whose diverse and individualistic food selection shows they're incredibly discerning at the dinner table.While the huge herbivores have a base diet of staples – also not unlike us – they eat a massive range of plant taxa, with one animal even showing to have more than 100 different species present in their poop sample.A global team of scientists including Brown University…

Elephants rarely get cancer, and their giant, hot testicles might provide a clue as to why. The idea comes down to a protein called p53, which helps prevent DNA damage in cells — including damage that could turn a normal cell into a cancerous cell.  Elephants, unlike humans, have multiple copies of the gene that encodes p53 — meaning, the gene that provides the “recipe” for the body to make the protein. Fritz Vollrath, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, said this could help to protect their sperm…