The Elephant in the Image [new study]

Can state-of -the-art visual analysis software always be relied on to find the elephant in an image? Akshay Raj Dhamija and colleagues at the VAST lab (Vision And Security Technology) at the Department of Computer Science, at University of Colorado, at Colorado Springs, US. have recently investigated the robustness of automated elephant detector systems. The team […]

How now, warm cow [Podcast 50]

Heat loss from a cow — that’s the deal in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams  —with dramatic readings by Daniel Rosenberg — tells about: Heat loss from a cow — Khan, Zahid A., Irfan Anjum Badruddin, G. A. Quadir, and K. N. Seetharamu (2006). ‘A Quick and Accurate […]

The role of flapping elephant ears in heat dissipation

Elephants are big, and they get hot. Especially in Africa. Thus, from the elephant’s point of view, there’s sometimes an urgent necessity to dissipate excess heat. Some investigators have suggested that flapping their large ears (strictly, their ‘pinnae’) could provide a significant heat-loss mechanism. (e.g. Buss, I. O., and Estes, J. A., 1971, ‘The Functional […]

Elephant Trumpets, the Acoustics of

“Because trumpeting is often associated with intensely social events, expressing the very high level of excitement and importance of the event, it is not easy to ask elephants for trumpet calls!” But that did not deter a research team at the Laboratoire d’Acoustique de l’Université du Maine, Le Mans, France (assisted by the Zoo de […]