Research in psychology has shown that when people are told not to think about a pink elephant they cannot avoid doing just that. Similar results are found for language production in that people leak information about hidden figures when instructed to ignore those figures. It is argued that the salience of information plays a crucial role in these effects. The present study investigates how diff...

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Recent surveys suggest tens of thousands of elephants are being poached annually across Africa, putting the two species at risk across much of their range. Although the financial motivations for ivory poaching are clear, the economic benefits of elephant conservation are poorly understood. We use Bayesian statistical modelling of tourist visits to protected areas, to quantify the lost economic ...

One class of random walks with infinite memory, so-called elephant random walks, are simple models describing anomalous diffusion. We present a surprising connection between these models and bond percolation on random recursive trees. We use a coupling between the two models to translate results from elephant random walks to the percolation process. We calculate, besides other quantities, exact...

Construction of age structures of populations is central to studies of demography of large vertebrates (Caughley 1977). Unlike in the case of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana), there are few published age structures of wild Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) populations (Sukumar 1989, 2003). On the other hand, age/sex structures for several Asian elephant populations are available in repo...

In this work we mtmduce a new concept of a searcb and rescue robotic system that is composed of an elephant trunk-like robot mounted on a mobile base. This system is capable not only of inspecling areas reachable by the mobile base but also to iaspCct unnachable areas such as small cracks, and pipes, using the camera mounted on its elephant trunk robot. In the report we describe &e mechanical s...

The superorder Afrotheria consists of a diverse group of mammals, including elephants, hyraxes, dugongs, sea cows, aardvarks, tenrecs, golden moles, and elephant shrews. Recent studies suggest this clade diverged from other placental mammals 100 million years ago and thus may represent the sister group to the remaining placental mammals. Despite this important taxonomic position, relatively few...

The African and Asian elephants and the mammoth diverged ca. 4-6 million years ago and their phylogenetic relationship has been controversial. Morphological studies have suggested a mammoth Asian elephant relationship, while molecular studies have produced conflicting results. We obtained cytochrome b sequences of up to 545 base pairs from five mammoths, 14 Asian and eight African elephants. A ...

Savannah elephants make extensive use of montane forest in three Tanzanian massifs, including the highly biodiverse Udzungwa Mountains. We have begun the first study of the Udzungwa elephant population, which is perceived to be increasing and is compressed due to loss of connectivity with adjacent protected areas. Meanwhile, human-elephant conflict outside the forests is escalating. We tested a...