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.

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.

Learning about how to become an elephant is almost synonymous with learning how to rediscover what it means to be human. Understanding elephants and saving elephants is a lesson in humanity. So many traits that are innate in elephants are those that we humans strive to be and possess. The "Elephant Lessons" take what we learn about elephant minds, culture and lives and applies it to our own everyday living to cultivate elephant qualities that are within each of us. Today's Lesson focuses on the Importance of Family.
 
Dame Daphne Sheldrick (photo shown above), the founder and director of The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, has lived in Kenya and has been hand-rearing baby and orphaned elephants for over thirty years. She notes that they share ...

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 ...