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elephants

04/19/2018 / By Frances Bloomfield

Biologists film elephant smoking: One pachyderm in India seems to have developed a strange new habit

Elephants aren’t known for eating burned wood then breathing out smoke. Yet that’s exactly what conservation scientists at India’s Nagarahole National Park came across while checking out hidden camera traps. In the 57-second video, a female Asian elephant can be seen scooping up chunks of ashen wood with her trunk and stuffing them into her […]

03/31/2018 / By Ethan Huff

Elephants have a gene that makes them resistant to cancer: Scientists find we have it too

Is it possible that certain mammals have the innate ability to adapt genetically and decrease their susceptibility to cancer? A recent study published in the journal Cell Reports seems to suggest so, indicating that elephants, the world’s largest land mammal, bear special resistance to cancer that stems from the way their genes have changed throughout […]

03/15/2018 / By Edsel Cook

More like humans than most realize, Asian elephants are very social creatures with complex personalities

The great 17th century French tragedian Peter Corneille once said that elephants are like people, only more so. Well, a new Finnish study proved that Asian elephants developed personalities and social needs in much the same way that humans do, reported a ScienceDaily article. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Turku in Finland. They investigated a […]

10/24/2017 / By Frances Bloomfield

TNT-sniffing elephants could soon be assisting landmine-location efforts in Angola

The 27-year Angolan Civil War has left indelible marks on the former Portuguese colony. The most enduring of these are, undoubtedly, the millions of undetonated landmines underneath the Angolan countryside. Tens of thousands of people have been seriously wounded or killed by landmines. In a bid to solve this crisis, people have turned to the […]

04/21/2017 / By Rhonda Johansson

Elephants are conscious beings with BODY awareness, new experiments reveal… are they smarter than humans?

“Dumbo” may be a misnomer. Elephants may be more intelligent than we thought — and trust us, we already thought very highly of these gentle giants. A team from Cambridge University said in a new study that elephants have high levels of self-awareness; an ability that doesn’t develop in human children until at least the […]

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