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Pointing is a sign that is understood by many animals
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Elephants really do get the point. New research has revealed that African elephants can spontaneously understand the intent of human pointing, and can use it as a cue to find food. While humans understand pointing from a very early age, only a few animals, such as dogs and horses, have the same ability, and it's thought that an elephant's understanding of pointing relates to the way they use their trunks to make gestures to each other in the wild.
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4710 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
How an elephant scratches its waist
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Here's a good reminder of how enormous elephants are - this one's using a Volkswagen as a scratching post. Photographed in South Africa, the elephant was in musth, which is a sexually aggressive period experienced by elephant bulls once a year.
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5232 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
Elephants have an incredible sense
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Elephants can sense rainstorms from up to 240 kilometres away. Researchers discovered these fascinating findings after tracking elephant migration over a period of seven years.
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10329 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
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13014 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
Most mammals take 21 seconds to pee, regardless of their size
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An elephant takes the same amount of time to empty its huge bladder as a cat - despite holding 3,600 times more urine. That's a whole lot of pressure. The controlling factor of urination duration is the length of the urethra, which gets longer at a predictable ratio as an animal gets bigger. All animals have urethras of the same aspect ratio: a length-to-width ratio of 18. This is rare among animals. Usually, body parts change in relative size, such as the eyes and brain. As the urethra gets longer, the effects of gravity increase and there's more pressure pushing out the urine. Source: http://www.sciencealert.com/most-mammals-take-21-seconds-to-pee-regardless-of-their-size ...
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11755 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
Bringing the wholly mammoth back to life
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Before you get any ideas that we're cloning wholly mammoths back into the 21st century, it's not that. An American geneticist has extracted DNA from the frozen remains of a long-dead mammoth found on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean (shown above), created a synthetic replica of it, and implanted it into elephant cells that have been isolated in a petri dish, using a new technique of DNA splicing that allows for unprecedented accuracy. The technique used to join synthetic mammoth DNA fragments with the genetic code of an elephant is called CRISPR/Cas9, and while it’s been recently used to create transgenic organisms, this is the first time it’s been used on the DNA of an extinct organism. Way to go! Source: http://www.sciencealert.com/mammot ...
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23645 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
How do you weigh an extinct animal?
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Researchers have a new way to estimate the weight of creatures that no longer exist using just its bones and a digital model. With no flesh to fill in the gaps, researchers "shrink wrap" the skeleton to come up with an estimated volume-to-mass conversion based on 14 modern-day mammals. Scientists hope that this weight-estimating technique can eventually be used on other extinct creatures... like dinosaurs!
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11034 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
Elephants possess tumour fighting genes that prevent cancer
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Having more cells usually puts one at a higher risk for cancer - but not for the elephant. Despite packing 100 times as many cells as humans, this towering animal can keep cancer at bay thanks to extra copies of a tumor-fighting gene. Researchers found that Asian elephants harbor 30 to 40 copies of the gene that encodes the protein p53, one of the most important mechanisms for preventing cancer and maintaining cell division. If cells have DNA damage that could spawn tumors, p53 prevents them from dividing until they make repairs or spurs them to commit suicide. In contrast, humans sport only two copies of the gene for p53, and so does elephants’ closest living relative, the rock hyrax. The extra copies probably accumulated millions of yea ...
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9931 |
duddy |
8 years ago |