animals (Page 9)

The soldier of the future will be a robot?or a man-machine, anyway. Maybe the rest of us will be too. The military is looking for ways to send signals directly to a soldier’s brain, without having to go through another human being. They’ve discovered a unexpected direct route to the brain: the human tongue.

Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition want to be able to send signals from cameras and sonar into soldiers? brains, so that they can gain hearing and sight of animals like owls and snakes. Our tongues are ultra-sensitive receptors, which anyone realizes who has ever had a filling or a cap put in. The tongue investigates the new addition to the mouth unceasingly, until it knows every nook and cranny.
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We recently put up a series of stories on the science behind the remake of the film King Kong. It turns out that there is a limit to how large?and thus how dangerous?mammals can become.

Seth Shostak writes in space.com that huge, unknown creatures are still being discovered here on Earth. As recently as 2004, Japanese researchers photographed a giant squid in the Pacific. Up until that time, the huge squid had been assumed to be a legend similar to that of the Loch Ness monster. A year earlier, in 2003, an even bigger squid was found off the coast of Antarctica.
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Legends said that African elephants could mysteriously communicate with each other across huge stretches of land. Now it’s been discovered that this is true?they do it by stamping their gigantic feet on the ground, setting off vibrations. There’s long been another legend that elephants return to the sites where their ancestors were killed, almost as if they were paying homage to them. There’s new evidence that this is also true.
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If a Cornell University researcher has his way, cheetahs, lions, elephants, camels and other large wild animals may soon roam parts of North America. But wait, you may say, cheetahs, lions and elephants aren’t native to the US! But their ancient ANCESTORS were, so there’s no reason these animals can’t live here again.

“If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, people think we’re nuts,” says biologist Harry Greene. “But if people hear the one-hour version, they realize they haven’t thought about this as much as we have.” He points out that these species are dying out rapidly in their native homes, especially in Africa. This may be our only chance to save them.
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