Disagreement About Forest Management

‘We can’t plant our way out of the climate crisis’

From: University of Michigan

May 20, 2021 -- Some climate activists advocate large-scale tree-planting campaigns in forests around the world to suck up heat-trapping carbon dioxide and help rein in climate change.

But in a Perspectives article scheduled for publication May 21 in the journal Science, a University of Michigan climate scientist and his University of Arizona colleague say the idea of planting trees as a substitute for the direct reduction of greenhouse gas emissions could be a pipe dream.

“We can’t plant our way out of the climate crisis,” said Arizona’s David Breshears, a top expert on tree mortality and forest die-off in the West. His co-author is Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability and an expert on paleoclimate and climate-vegetation interactions.

Instead of wasting money by planting lots of trees in a way that is destined to fail, it makes more sense to focus on keeping existing forests healthy so they can continue to act as carbon “sinks,” removing carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and storing it in trees and soils, according to the researchers. At the same time, emissions must be reduced as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

Overpeck and Breshears say they hope the role of the world’s forests—and specifically the urgent need to protect existing forests and keep them intact—is thoroughly debated when the world’s climate action leaders gather at the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow this November.

“Policymakers need to enable new science, policy and finance mechanisms optimized for the disturbance and vegetation change that is unstoppable, and also to ensure that the trees and forests we wish to plant or preserve for the carbon they sequester survive in the face of climate change and other human threats,” Overpeck and Breshears wrote.

“Failure to meet this challenge will mean that large terrestrial stores of carbon will be lost to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change and the impacts on vegetation that threaten many more of the ecosystem services on which humans depend.”

Keeping forests healthy will require a new approach to forest management, one that Overpeck and Breshears call managing for change. As a first step, policymakers and land managers need to acknowledge that additional large-scale vegetation changes are inevitable.

Climate change has been implicated in record-setting wildfires in the western United States, Australia and elsewhere, as well as extensive tree die-offs that are largely due to hotter, drier climate extremes. Those disturbing trends are expected to accelerate as the climate warms, according to Overpeck and Breshears.

“Even in a world where climate change is soon halted, global temperature rise will likely reach between 1.5 and 2 C above pre-industrial levels, with all the associated extreme heat waves that brings, and thus global vegetation will face up to double the climate change already experienced,” they wrote.

At the same time, deforestation continues to expand globally and is especially damaging in tropical forests, which hold vast amounts of biodiversity and sequestered carbon.

The next step toward a new managing-for-change paradigm is to manage forests proactively for the vegetation changes that can be anticipated—instead of trying to maintain forests as they were in the 20th century, Overpeck and Breshears say.

Managing for change means, for example, more aggressive thinning of forests to reduce the buildup of fuels that stoke massive wildfires. It also means selectively replacing some trees—after a wildfire, for example—that are no longer in optimal climate zones with new species that will thrive now and in coming decades.

Such activities, where needed, will inevitably increase the costs of forest management, according to the researchers. But such costs should be considered a prudent investment, one that helps preserve an underappreciated service that forests provide to humanity for free: carbon storage, also known as carbon sequestration.

Forests are already managed to preserve the natural resources and ecosystem services they provide. In addition to supplying timber, fuelwood, fiber and other products, forests clean the air, filter the water, and help control erosion and flooding. They preserve biodiversity and promote soil formation and nutrient cycling, while offering recreational opportunities such as hiking, camping, fishing and hunting.

Carbon sequestration should rank high on the list of invaluable services that forests provide, and efforts to preserve and enhance this vital function should be funded accordingly, Overpeck and Breshears say.

For example, there’s a big opportunity to improve the ability of forests to store carbon through increased use of biochar, a form of charcoal produced by exposing organic waste matter—such as wood chips, crop residue or manure—to heat in a low-oxygen environment. Large amounts of wood generated during forest thinning projects could be converted to biochar, then added to forest soils to improve their health and increase the amount of carbon that is locked away, Overpeck says.

“Thinning of forests, conversion of the removed wood to biochar and burial of the biochar in forest soils is a way to bring new jobs to forested rural areas while allowing forests to play a bigger role in keeping carbon out of the atmosphere and thus fighting climate change,” he said. “Forest carbon management could be a boon for rural areas in need of new economic engines.”

In the long run, such projects are likely to benefit forests and enhance their ability to store carbon far more than massive tree-planting campaigns conducted without appropriate management strategies, according to Overpeck and Breshears.

“Tree-planting has great appeal to some climate activists because it is easy and not that expensive,” Breshears said. “But it’s like bailing water with a big hole in the bucket: While adding more trees can help slow ongoing warming, we’re simultaneously losing trees because of that ongoing warming.”

In their Perspectives article, Overpeck and Breshears explore the implications of a new study by Ondřej Mottl et al., also scheduled for publication May 21 in Science, titled “Global acceleration in rates of vegetation change over the past 18,000 years.”

https://news.umich.edu/forests-and-climate-change-we-cant-plant-our-way-out-of-the-climate-crisis/

 

Spiking Immune System to Fight Cancer

A new study shows how engineered immune cells used in new cancer therapies can overcome physical barriers to allow a patient's own immune system to fight tumors.

From:  University of Minnesota

May 14, 2021 -- The research could improve cancer therapies in the future for millions of people worldwide.

The research is published in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Research.

Instead of using chemicals or radiation, immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that helps the patient's immune system fight cancer. T cells are a type of white blood cell that are of key importance to the immune system. Cytotoxic T cells are like soldiers who search out and destroy the targeted invader cells.

While there has been success in using immunotherapy for some types of cancer in the blood or blood-producing organs, a T cell's job is much more difficult in solid tumors.

"The tumor is sort of like an obstacle course, and the T cell has to run the gauntlet to reach the cancer cells," said Paolo Provenzano, the senior author of the study and a biomedical engineering associate professor in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering. "These T cells get into tumors, but they just can't move around well, and they can't go where they need to go before they run out of gas and are exhausted."

In this first-of-its-kind study, the researchers are working to engineer the T cells and develop engineering design criteria to mechanically optimize the cells or make them more "fit" to overcome the barriers. If these immune cells can recognize and get to the cancer cells, then they can destroy the tumor.

In a fibrous mass of a tumor, the stiffness of the tumor causes immune cells to slow down about two-fold -- almost like they are running in quicksand.

"This study is our first publication where we have identified some structural and signaling elements where we can tune these T cells to make them more effective cancer fighters," said Provenzano, a researcher in the University of Minnesota Masonic Cancer Center. "Every 'obstacle course' within a tumor is slightly different, but there are some similarities. After engineering these immune cells, we found that they moved through the tumor almost twice as fast no matter what obstacles were in their way."

To engineer cytotoxic T cells, the authors used advanced gene editing technologies (also called genome editing) to change the DNA of the T cells so they are better able to overcome the tumor's barriers. The ultimate goal is to slow down the cancer cells and speed up the engineered immune cells. The researchers are working to create cells that are good at overcoming different kinds of barriers. When these cells are mixed together, the goal is for groups of immune cells to overcome all the different types of barriers to reach the cancer cells.

Provenzano said the next steps are to continue studying the mechanical properties of the cells to better understand how the immune cells and cancer cells interact. The researchers are currently studying engineered immune cells in rodents and in the future are planning clinical trials in humans.

While initial research has been focused on pancreatic cancer, Provenzano said the techniques they are developing could be used on many types of cancers.

"Using a cell engineering approach to fight cancer is a relatively new field," Provenzano said. "It allows for a very personalized approach with applications for a wide array of cancers. We feel we are expanding a new line of research to look at how our own bodies can fight cancer. This could have a big impact in the future."

          https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210514134222.htm

Certain Proteins Predict Future Dementia

LARGE STUDY OF PLASMA PROTEINS AND DEMENTIA ILLUMINATES THE BIOLOGY OF DEMENTIA AND ALZHEIMER’S AND MAY HELP LEAD TO TREATMENTS

May 17, 2021 -- The development of dementia, often from Alzheimer’s disease, late in life is associated with abnormal blood levels of dozens of proteins up to five years earlier, according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Most of these proteins were not known to be linked to dementia before, suggesting new targets for prevention therapies.

The findings are based on new analyses of blood samples of over ten thousand middle-aged and elderly people—samples that were taken and stored during large-scale studies decades ago as part of an ongoing study. The researchers linked abnormal blood levels of 38 proteins to higher risks of developing Alzheimers within five years. Of those 38 proteins, 16 appeared to predict Alzheimer’s risk two decades in advance.

Although most of these risk markers may be only incidental byproducts of the slow disease process that leads to Alzheimer’s, the analysis pointed to high levels of one protein, SVEP1, as a likely causal contributor to that disease process.

The study was published May 14 in Nature Aging

“This is the most comprehensive analysis of its kind to date, and it sheds light on multiple biological pathways that are connected to Alzheimer’s,” says study senior author Josef Coresh, MD, PhD, MHS, George W. Comstock Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Bloomberg School. “Some of these proteins we uncovered are just indicators that disease might occur, but a subset may be causally relevant, which is exciting because it raises the possibility of targeting these proteins with future treatments.”

More than six million Americans are estimated to have Alzheimer’s, the most common type of dementia, an irreversible fatal condition that leads to loss of cognitive and physical function. Despite decades of intensive study, there are no treatments that can slow the disease process, let alone stop or reverse it. Scientists widely assume that the best time to treat Alzheimer’s is before dementia symptoms develop.

Efforts to gauge people’s Alzheimer’s risk before dementia arises have focused mainly on the two most obvious features of Alzheimer’s brain pathology: clumps of amyloid beta protein known as plaques, and tangles of tau protein. Scientists have shown that brain imaging of plaques, and blood or cerebrospinal fluid levels of amyloid beta or tau, have some value in predicting Alzheimer’s years in advance.

But humans have tens of thousands of other distinct proteins in their cells and blood, and techniques for measuring many of these from a single, small blood sample have advanced in recent years. Would a more comprehensive analysis using such techniques reveal other harbingers of Alzheimer’s? That’s the question Coresh and colleagues sought to answer in this new study.

The researchers’ initial analysis covered blood samples taken during 2011–13 from more than 4,800 late-middle-aged participants in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, a large epidemiological study of heart disease-related risk factors and outcomes that has been running in four U.S. communities since 1985. Collaborating researchers at a laboratory technology company called SomaLogic used a technology they recently developed, SomaScan, to record levels of nearly 5,000 distinct proteins in the banked ARIC samples.

The researchers analyzed the results and found 38 proteins whose abnormal levels were significantly associated with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s in the five years following the blood draw.

They then used SomaScan to measure protein levels from more than 11,000 blood samples taken from much younger ARIC participants in 1993–95. They found that abnormal levels of 16 of the 38 previously identified proteins were associated with the development of Alzheimer’s in the nearly two decades between that blood draw and a follow-up clinical evaluation in 2011–13.

To verify these findings in a different patient population, the scientists reviewed the results of an earlier SomaScan of blood samples taken in 2002–06 during an Icelandic study. That study had assayed proteins including 13 of the 16 proteins identified in the ARIC analyses. Of those 13 proteins, six were again associated with Alzheimer’s risk over a roughly 10-year follow-up period.

In a further statistical analysis, the researchers compared the identified proteins with data from past studies of genetic links to Alzheimer’s. The comparison suggested strongly that one of the identified proteins, SVEP1, is not just an incidental marker of Alzheimer’s risk but is involved in triggering or driving the disease.

SVEP1 is a protein whose normal functions remain somewhat mysterious, although in a study published earlier this year it was linked to the thickened artery condition, atherosclerosis, which underlies heart attacks and strokes.

Other proteins associated with Alzheimer’s risk in the new study included several key immune proteins—which is consistent with decades of findings linking Alzheimer’s to abnormally intense immune activity in the brain.

The researchers plan to continue using techniques like SomaScan to analyze proteins in banked blood samples from long-term studies to identify potential Alzheimer’s-triggering pathways—a potential strategy to suggest new approaches for Alzheimer’s treatments.

The scientists have also been studying how protein levels in the ARIC samples are linked to other diseases such as vascular (blood vessel-related) disease in the brain, heart and the kidney.

First author Keenan Walker, PhD, worked on this analysis while on faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School’s Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research. He is currently an investigator with the National Institute of Aging’s Intramural Research Program.

https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2021/researchers-identify-proteins-that-predict-future-dementia-alzheimers-risk.html

Simple Surgery Prevents Some Strokes

Extends life for patients with heart arrhythmia

From: McMaster University in Canada

May 15, 2021 -- A simple surgery saves patients with heart arrhythmia from often-lethal strokes, says a large international study led by McMaster University.

Researchers found that removing the left atrial appendage— an unused, finger-like tissue that can trap blood in the heart chamber and increase the risk of clots— cuts the risk of strokes by more than one-third in patients with atrial fibrillation.

Even better, the reduced clotting risk comes on top of any other benefits conferred by blood-thinner medications patients with this condition are usually prescribed.

“If you have atrial fibrillation and are undergoing heart surgery, the surgeon should be removing your left atrial appendage, because it is a set-up for forming clots. Our trial has shown this to be both safe and effective for stroke prevention,” said Richard Whitlock, first author of the study.

“This is going to have a positive impact on tens of thousands of patients globally.”

Whitlock is a scientist at the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), a joint institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS); a professor of surgery at McMaster, the Canada Research Chair in cardiovascular surgical trials, a cardiac surgeon for HHS, and is supported by a Heart and Stroke Foundation career award.

The co-principal investigator of the study is Stuart Connolly who has also advanced this field by establishing the efficacy and safety of newer blood thinners. He is a professor emeritus of medicine at McMaster, a PHRI senior scientist and a HHS cardiologist.

“The results of this study will change practice right away because this procedure is simple, quick and safe for the 15 per cent of heart surgery patients who have atrial fibrillation. This will prevent a great burden of suffering due to stroke,” Connolly said.

The study results were fast tracked into publication by The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American College of Cardiology conference today.

The study tracked 4,811 people in 27 countries who are living with atrial fibrillation and taking blood thinners. Consenting patients undertaking cardiopulmonary bypass surgery were randomly selected for the additional left atrial appendage occlusion surgery; their outcomes compared with those who only took medicine. They were all followed for a median of four years.

Whitlock said it was suspected since the 1940s that blood clots can form in the left atrial appendage in patients with atrial fibrillation, and it made sense to cut this useless structure off if the heart was exposed for other surgery. This is now proven to be true.

Atrial fibrillation is common in elderly people and is responsible for about 25 per cent of ischemic strokes which are caused when blood clots block arteries supplying parts of the brain. The average age of patients in the study was 71.

“In the past all we had was medicine. Now we can treat atrial fibrillation with both medicines and surgery to ensure a much better outcome,” said Whitlock.

He said that the current study tested the procedure during cardiac surgery being undertaken for other reasons, but the procedure can also be done through less invasive methods for patients not having heart surgery. He added that future studies to examine that approach will be important.

Whitlock said the left atrial appendage is a leftover from how a person’s heart forms as an embryo and it has little function later in life.

“This is an inexpensive procedure that is safe, without any long-term adverse effects, and the impact is long-term.”

External funding for the study came from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada.

    Simple surgery prevents strokes in heart patients – Brighter World (mcmaster.ca)

The Eyes As a Window into Alzheimer’s

Retinal Scans Tie Blood Vessel Deterioration to Genetic Marker for Alzheimer’s Disease

By Vicky Stein, University of California San Francisco

May 13, 2021 -- While it has been said that the eyes are a window to the soul, a new study shows they could be a means for understanding diseases of the brain. According to new research by scientists at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, retinal scans can detect key changes in blood vessels that may provide an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, while offering important insights into how one of the most common Alzheimer's risk genes contributes to the disease. 

“The most prevalent genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease is a variant of the APOE gene, known as APOE4,” said lead author Fanny Elahi, MD, PhD. “We still don’t fully understand how this variant increases risk of brain degeneration, we just know that it does, and that this risk is modified by sex, race, and lifestyle. Our research provides new insights into how APOE4 impacts blood vessels and may provide a path forward for early detection of neurodegenerative disease.” 

Studies in mice have explored the effect of APOE4 on capillaries in the brain. Elahi, an assistant professor of neurology and member of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC), has long suspected these tiny blood vessels may play a significant role in Alzheimer’s disease, since they deliver nutrients and oxygen, carry away waste, and police immune system responses through the protective shield known as the blood–brain barrier. Damage to these blood vessels could cause a host of problems, she says, including the protein buildup and cognitive decline seen in individuals affected by Alzheimer’s disease. 

Because the technology does not exist to visualize individual capillaries in living people’s brains, Elahi and colleagues turned to the eye. In the new study, which publishes May 15, 2021, in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, Elahi and her team have shown that APOE4-associated capillary changes can be detected in humans through an easy, comfortable eye scan. As a light-penetrating tissue that shares biology with the brain, the retina, researchers believe, may help determine what APOE4 variants may be doing to similar capillaries inside the brain, even in those without dementia. 

The team – which includes Ari Green, MD, a neuro-ophthalmologist, professor, and director of the UCSF Neurodiagnostic Center, and Amir Kashani, MD, PhD, associate professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute – used an advanced retinal imaging technique known as optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) to peer into the eyes of aging people with and without APOE4 mutations to evaluate the smallest blood vessels at the back of the eye.  

The team leveraged the well-characterized cohorts of people enrolled in ongoing studies of brain aging and neurodegenerative disease at the MAC. By adding OCTA scans to existing MRI and PET scan data, they gain comparative insights without putting volunteer participants through additional discomfort. “That’s the beauty of this technique,” Elahi said. “It’s very easy, noninvasive and participant-friendly.” 

Analyzing the retinal scans, the researchers found reduced capillary density in APOE4 carriers, an effect that increased with participant age. To test whether those scans accurately reflected what was happening in the brain, the team then compared the abnormalities seen in OCTA scans of retinal capillaries to measurements of brain perfusion, or the flow of blood through the brain, as measured via MRI. They found that people with higher retinal capillary density also had greater blood flow in the brain. 

Finally, the team looked to participants with prior PET scans of beta-amyloid, the protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease, to see how their retinal capillary measurements related to the burden of amyloid plaques in the brain, which is the major focus of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, research and treatment to date. They found that capillary density did not differ between groups with and without amyloid plaques, nor did it vary along with amyloid burden. According to Elahi, that independence suggests that capillary abnormalities are unlikely to be driven by amyloid pathology, or that their relation may at most be indirect.  

“This is the first time that we have demonstrated in living, asymptomatic humans that the smallest blood vessels are affected in APOE4 gene carriers,” said Elahi. That’s important, she added, because it suggests that the increased risk of brain degeneration and Alzheimer’s disease in APOE4 carriers may be through its effect on blood vessels.  

Elahi and her colleagues plan to follow their study participants to better understand blood vessel dysfunction at a molecular level. That work could help detect the onset of Alzheimer’s disease before significant damage occurs to the brain and identify new vascular targets for early treatment.  

“This is just the beginning,” Elahi said. "But the implications for early detection and possible intervention can be significant in combatting Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. It's much harder to regenerate neurons than to stop their degeneration from happening in the first place. Similar to cancer, early detection can save lives,"  

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/05/420526/eyes-offer-window-alzheimers-disease

The Startling Intelligence of Elephants

Elephant cognition is the study of animal cognition as present in elephants. Most contemporary ethologists view the elephant as one of the world's most intelligent animals. With a mass of just over 5 kg (11 lb), an elephant's brain has more mass than that of any other land animal, and although the largest whales have body masses twenty times those of a typical elephant, a whale's brain is barely twice the mass of an elephant's brain. In addition, elephants have around 257 billion neurons.  Elephant brains are similar to humans' and many other mammals' in terms of general connectivity and functional areas, with several unique structural differences. Although initially estimated to have as many neurons as a human brain, the elephant's cortex has about one-third of the number of neurons as a human brain.

Elephants manifest a wide variety of behaviors, including those associated with grief, learning, mimicry, play, altruism, use of tools, compassion, cooperation, self-awareness, memory, and communication.  Further, evidence suggests elephants may understand pointing: the ability to nonverbally communicate an object by extending a finger, or equivalent.  It is thought they are equal with cetaceans and primates in this regard. Due to such claims of high intelligence and due to strong family ties of elephants, some researchers argue it is morally wrong for humans to cull them.  Aristotle described the elephant as "the animal that surpasses all others in wit and mind."

Elephant Society

The elephant has one of the most closely knit societies of any living species. Elephant families can only be separated by death or capture.  Cynthia Moss, an ethologist specializing in elephants, recalls an event involving a family of African elephants.

Two members of the family were shot by poachers, who were subsequently chased off by the remaining elephants. Although one of the elephants died, the other, named Tina, remained standing, but with knees beginning to give way. Two family members, Trista and Teresia (Tina's mother), walked to both sides of Tina and leaned in to hold her up. Eventually, Tina grew so weak, she fell to the ground and died. However, Trista and Teresia did not give up but continually tried to lift her. They managed to get Tina into a sitting position, but her body was lifeless and fell to the ground again. As the other elephant family members became more intensely involved in the aid, they tried to put grass into Tina's mouth. Teresia then put her tusks beneath Tina's head and front quarters and proceeded to lift her. As she did so, her right tusk broke completely off, right up to the lip and nerve cavity. The elephants gave up trying to lift Tina but did not leave her; instead, they began to bury her in a shallow grave and throw leaves over her body. They stood over Tina for the night and then began to leave in the morning. The last to leave was Teresia.

Because elephants are so closely knit and highly matriarchal, a family can be devastated by the death of another (especially a matriarch), and some groups never recover their organization. Cynthia Moss has observed a mother, after the death of her calf, walk sluggishly at the back of a family for many days.

Edward Topsell stated in his publication The History of Four-Footed Beasts in 1658, "There is no creature among all the Beasts of the world which hath so great and ample demonstration of the power and wisdom of almighty God as the elephant."  Elephants are believed to be on par with chimpanzees with regard to their cooperative skills.

Elephant Altruism

Elephants are thought to be highly altruistic animals that even aid other species, including humans, in distress. In India, an elephant was helping locals lift logs by following a truck and placing the logs in pre-dug holes upon instruction from the mahout (elephant trainer). At a certain hole, the elephant refused to lower the log. The mahout came to investigate the hold-up and noticed a dog sleeping in the hole. The elephant only lowered the log when the dog was gone.  When an elephant is hurt, other elephants (even if they are unrelated) aid them.

Cynthia Moss has often seen elephants going out of their way to avoid hurting or killing a human, even when it was difficult for them (such as having to walk backwards to avoid a person).  Joyce Poole documented an encounter told to her by Colin Francombe on Kuki Gallman's Laikipia Ranch. A ranch herder was out on his own with camels when he came across a family of elephants. The matriarch charged at him and knocked him over with her trunk, breaking one of his legs. In the evening, when he did not return, a search party was sent in a truck to find him. When the party discovered him, he was being guarded by an elephant. The animal charged the truck, so they shot over her and scared her away. The herdsman later told them that when he could not stand up, the elephant used her trunk to lift him under the shade of a tree. She guarded him for the day and would gently touch him with her trunk.

Elephant Mimicry

Recent studies have shown that elephants can also mimicsounds they hear. The discovery was found when Mlaika, an orphaned elephant, would copy the sound of trucks passing by. So far, the only other animals that are thought to mimic sounds are whales, dolphins, bats, primates and birds.  Calimero, an African elephant who was 23 years old, also exhibited a unique form of mimicry. He was in a Swiss zoo with some Asian elephants. Asian elephants use chirps that are different from African elephants' deep rumbling noises. Calimero also began to chirp and not make the deep calls that his species normally would.

Kosik, an Indian elephant at Everland Amusement Park, South Korea can imitate up to five  Korean words, including sit, no, yes and lie down.  Kosik produces these human-like sounds by putting his trunk in his mouth and then shaking it while breathing out, similar to how people whistle with their fingers.

Ecologist O’Connell-Rodwell’s conducted research in 1997 which concluded that elephants create low-frequency vibrations (seismic signals) through their trunks and feet to communicate across long distances.  Elephants use contact calls to stay in touch with one another when they are out of one another's sight. In 2004, Joseph Soltis conducted a study to understand the low-frequency vocalization elephants used to communicate across short-distances. The research found that closely allied female elephants were more likely to produce ‘rumbles’ to other members at twice the rate of those who had lesser integrated members.  Female elephants are able to remember and distinguish the contact calls of female family and bond group members from those of females outside of their extended family network. They can also distinguish between the calls of family units depending upon how frequently they came across them.

Joyce Poole, of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, Kenya, has demonstrated vocal learning and imitation in elephants of sounds made by each other and in the environment. She is beginning to research whether sounds made by elephants have dialects, a trait that is rare in the animal kingdom.

Use of Tools

Elephants show a remarkable ability to use tools, using their trunks like arms. Elephants have been observed digging holes to drink water and then ripping bark from a tree, chewing it into the shape of a ball, filling in the hole and covering over it with sand to avoid evaporation, then later going back to the spot for a drink. They also often use branches to swat flies or scratch themselves.  Asian Elephants have also been known to drop large rocks onto an electric fence to break the fence or to cut off the electricity.  Asian elephants in India have been known to break electric fences using logs and clear the surrounding wires using their tusks to provide a safe passageway.

                   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition

Chinese Rover Lands Successfully on Mars

Tianwen-1 (TW-1, literally Heavenly Questions) is an interplanetary mission by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) to send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, consisting of an orbiter, deployable camera, lander and the Zhurong rover.  The spacecraft, with a total mass of nearly five tons, is one of the heaviest probes launched to Mars and carries 13 scientific instruments.

The scientific objectives of the mission relate to the geology of Mars, the current and past presence of water, the internal structure of the planet, identification of minerals and rock types on the surface, as well as characterization of the space environment and atmosphere of Mars.

The mission's three spacecraft was launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on 23 July 2020 on a Long March 5 heavy-lift launch vehicle. After seven months of transit, it entered orbit around Mars on 10 February 2021.  For the next three months the space probe studied the target landing sites from a reconnaissance orbit. On 14 May 2021, the lander successfully landed on Mars.  With the landing, China became the third nation to achieve a successful soft landing on Mars, after the Soviet Union and the United States.  If the deployment of the rover is also successful, China would become only the second nation to accomplish this feat, after the United States, and the first nation to orbit, land and release a rover during its first mission to arrive at Mars.

The Tianwen-1 mission was the second of three Martian exploration missions launched during the July 2020 window, with missions also launched by the national space agencies of the United Arab Emirates (Emirates Mars Mission with the Hope orbiter) and the United States (Mars 2020 with the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter drone).

Landing on Mars May 14

At 23:18 UTC, on 14 May 2021, the Tianwen-1 lander successfully landed in the preselected landing area in the southern part of the Mars Utopia Planitia.  The landing phase began with the release of the protective capsule containing the lander/rover. The capsule made an atmospheric entry followed by a descent phase under parachute, after which the lander used retro-propulsion to soft-land on Mars.

Current plans call for the lander to deploy the rover Zhurong on 22 May 2021. The rover is designed to explore the surface for 90 sols; its height is about 1.85 m (6.1 ft) and it has a mass of about 240 kg (530 lb). After the planned rover deployment, the orbiter would serve as a telecommunications relay for the rover while continuing to conduct its own orbital observations of Mars.

Chinese President Xi Jinping stated in response to the landing, "You were brave enough for the challenge, pursued excellence and placed our country in the advanced ranks of planetary exploration.  Your outstanding achievement will forever be etched in the memories of the motherland and the people.

                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-1