YESTERDAY’S SCIENCE TIDBITS REVEALED A.I. SKULLDUGGERY within academic journal commentaries. Today’s continue with elephants and weather forecasting. Talk about variety.
Behaviors Reveal Sophisticated Tool Use—and Possible “Pranking” Among Pachyderms. Elephants are known for being particularly intelligent, even to problem-solving and insight. Sara Reardone writes, “This Elephant Learned to Use a Hose as a Shower. Then Her Rival Sought Revenge,” Science, November 8, 2024.
Mary enjoys a trunk-controlled shower—until Achali gets envious. Video from Urban Et Al., Current Biology (2024) via Science.
“Mary ls ‘left-trunked,’ ” writes Reardone, “so holding the hose made it easier for her to reach her left side. Because Mary was born in the wild and has previously lived in other zoos, it’s unclear whether she learned how to shower from other elephants or invented the strategy herself.”
However, Reardone recounts, “When the researchers started to give Mary [a mature 58-year-old] extra shower time, Anchali [a punky 12-year-old] seemed to resent it…. A few weeks after the experiments began, Anchali figured out she could interrupt her colleague’s showers by picking the hose up with her trunk and kinking it to stop the water flow.”
Reardone continues, “Over the weeks in which the researchers were studying Mary’s showers, Anchali began to kink the hose more frequently and got better at it, suggesting she was practicing and learning. She also started to stand on the hose—something the caretakers had specifically trained the elephants not to do.” It’s not clear “whether Anchali was vengeful toward Mary or was just teasing her in the way that some apes do while playing.”
Either way, quelle punk.
Would You Want This Guy to be Your Weatherman?? Perhaps you recall when our (very stable genius) President took a Sharpie to correct NOAA predictions of Hurricane Dorian’s path?
Image by Evan Vucci/AP via Science.
Paul Voosen writes, “U.S. Climate Scientists Gird for a Second Trump Administration,” Science, December 13, 2024. Among other expected actions, Voosen notes, “Trump allies have vowed to squash research and fire adversaries.”
Gulp. This is right up there with putting RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services.
Voosen recounts, “Last week, at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facility here, more than 100 climate scientists, many of them federal employees, gathered for a forum on tracking and reporting greenhouse gases. The mood was undeniably anxious. President Joe Biden’s administration had elevated their work, creating the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center last year as part of a new national strategy. But would that put them in the crosshairs of the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump?”
Voosen recalls that Trump “has recently said climate change and its impacts are ‘one of the greatest scams of all time….’”
Isn’t it ironic that his very stable genius so often ascribes faults to others that best mirror his own? “You calls ’em like you knows ’em.”
Project 2025. Voosen describes, “Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to lead the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget, authored a chapter of Project 2025, a conservative policy plan developed by the Heritage Foundation. It states that ‘the Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.’ Elsewhere, Project 2025 promises to purge climate science from DOD operations and proposes drastic cuts to climate research at NOAA.”
God help the country. Buy Sharpie futures. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025