Elephants can run

How amazing it is! Let’s discover below amazing elephants for kids: Can elephants run?

Most animals don't think anything of breaking into a run: they switch effortlessly from walking to a high-speed bouncing run. But what about elephants? Their sheer size makes it impossible for them to bounce up in the air at high speeds. So how are high-speed elephants moving: are they running or walking?

At a first glance, fast-moving elephants look as if they are walking, according to John Hutchinson from the Royal Veterinary College, UK. But closer analysis of elephant footfall patterns by Hutchinson suggested that speedy elephants' front legs walk while their hind legs may trot. Norman Heglund from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, realised that the only way to resolve the conundrum was to measure the immense forces exerted on the animals by the ground as they move and found that elephants run in some senses, but not in others.

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To measure these forces, Heglund had to construct and calibrate an 8m long, elephant-sized force platform from sixteen 1m2 force plates. Crating the 300kg force plates, cameras and computers in Belgium and shipping the equipment to the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre in Lampang, Thailand, Heglund, Joakim Genin, Patrick Willems, Giovanni Cavagna and Richard Lair built a reinforced concrete foundation and assembled the force platform ready to measure the enormous ground reaction forces generated by the animals.

Encouraged to move by their mahouts, 34 elephants ranging from an 870kg baby up to a 4 tonne adult moved over the force platform at speeds ranging from a 0.38m/s stroll to a 4.97m/s charge. Based on the force measurements, the Belgian team was able to reconstruct the movement of each animal's centre of mass and found that the elephant's movements are extremely economical. Consuming a minimum of 0.8J/kg/m, an elephant's cost of transport is 1/3 that of humans and 1/30 that of mice.

Heglund explains that the elephant's cost of transport is low because the animal's step frequency is higher than expected and they improve their stability by keeping an average of two feet on the ground even at high speeds, and three at lower speeds. Combining these approaches, the elephant's centre of mass bounces less than other animals', reducing the giant's cost of transport.

Next the team calculated the way that each animal recycles potential energy into kinetic energy to find out whether they run. According to Heglund, running animals continually recycle potential energy stored in tendons and muscles into bouncing kinetic energy -- just like a pogo stick -- while walking animals convert potential energy at the start of a stride into kinetic energy as they step forward -- much like an inverted swinging pendulum. By tracking how elephants cycle potential energy into kinetic energy over the course of a stride, the team could distinguish whether the high-speed animals were running or walking.

Plotting the potential and kinetic energy of the elephants' centres of mass over the course of many strides at different speeds, the team could see that the elephants were walking like an inverted pendulum at low speeds, but as they moved faster, the kinetic and potential energy plots shifted to look like those of runners. However, when the team analysed the movements of the elephant's centre of mass, they could see that it almost maintained a constant level as the animal shifted its weight from one side to the other, but bobbed down and up like a runner's during the second half of the stride.

So the elephants were running by one measure but not by another and it seems that the forelimbs trot while the hind limbs walk at higher speeds. 'High-speed locomotion in an elephant doesn't fall nicely into a classic category like a run or a trot. It really depends on your definition of "run",' says Heglund.

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The human and animal genome

Keep reading for more interesting information about science facts: The human and animal genome

It is very difficult to find reliable data comparing the human genome to animal genome. The principal reason is that few animals have had their full genome sequenced. Even those that have cannot be easily compared in terms of percentages because the genomic length and chromosomal division can vary greatly from one species to another.

Scouring the Web, here is what I have found so far.

- Genome-wide variation from one human being to another can be up to 0.5% (99.5% similarity)

- Chimpanzees are 96% to 98% similar to humans, depending on how it is calculated.

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- Cats have 90% of homologous genes with humans, 82% with dogs, 80% with cows, 79% with chimpanzees, 69% with rats and 67% with mice. 

- Cows (Bos taurus) are 80% genetically similar to humans.

- 75% of mouse genes have equivalents in humans (source), 90% of the mouse genome could be lined up with a region on the human genome (source) 99% of mouse genes turn out to have analogues in humans 

- The fruit fly (Drosophila) shares about 60% of its DNA with humans.

- About 60% of chicken genes correspond to a similar human gene.

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Fun Facts About Elephants

Have you ever wondered about interesting elephant facts? Let’s see how

1. There are two recognised species (types) of elephants the African elephant and the Asian elephant. The Indian elephant is a sub species of the Asian elephant. Elephants live in areas of Africa, Southern and Southeast Asia
2. The elephant is the national animal of Thailand.
3. A newborn elephant is able to stand up on its feet very soon after it’s born.
4. An elephant’s trunk has more than 40,000 muscles in it and no bones, which give it the flexibility. However, the trunk can get very heavy at times. So, the elephants are seen to rest it on their tusk.
5. Elephants consume around 15 quarts of water at a time.
6. As the elephants rely on one tusk more than the other, usually one tusk goes through the grinding leading to one being longer than the other.
7. Elephants use their trunks as a hose pipe by filling their trunks and then pouring the water in the mouth.
8. African and Asian elephants differ in several ways, but the variation in ears is commonly used to differentiate them. Some say that African species have ears that look like a map of Africa, and the Asian species have smaller ears that look like a map of India. Other differences include the body size, African elephants are much bigger and heavier, the skin is more wrinkled and tusks larger. The tip on the trunk of an African elephant has two prong like tips which are used to grasp objects whereas the Asian elephant has only one
9. Despite the size of elephant ears the quality of hearing is poor! The body at the back of an elephant ear is surprisingly soft, and called the knuckle, this area is used by trainers to steer and give commands to the elephant. The ears on an African elephant are flapped to help keep the animal cool
10. Elephants are herbivores, they eat varying types of vegetation including grass, leaves, fruits, and bark
11. Elephants have a walking speed of approximately 4 mph. A surprising fact is that they are able to swim for long distances!
12. Elephants can spend up to 16 hours a day eating; on average they can eat approximately 495 pounds of food each day - that's a lot of leaves
13. A female elephant has the longest gestation period (pregnancy) than any other land mammal on earth; 22 months. When a calf is born it weighs approximately 100kg, it will be raised in a strong family group led by one matriarchal older female. Baby elephants are often depicted holding onto the tails of their elders
14. A male calf is raised by a female herd until it reaches the age of 12-15, when it leaves to joins the males or live alone. It will be reunited with females annually in order to mate
15. A fully grown adult male African Elephants can reach 10 - 13 feet high and weigh about 15,400 pounds. In comparison, a fully grown male Indian Elephant is unlikely to grow beyond 10 feet, it will weigh approximately 11,000 pounds
16. Elephant tusks are made of ivory and are actually enormouslyenlarged teeth (incisors). They start to grow between 6–12 months of age to replace the milk teeth, they grow approximately 17cm a year
17. Not all elephants have tusks; generally both male and female African elephants have tusks that are of similar size. Only the males in the Asian species have large tusks, if the females have them they are much smaller. It is quite common for Sri Lankan male elephants to have no tusk at all. Tusks are also known as ivory

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Why elephant has a long trunk?

How awesome it is! Let’s discover the answering for the elephant facts question: Why elephants have a long trunk

The elephant got its trunk, the story goes, because one small elephant child was so curious as to what a hungry crocodile ate for dinner that he got too close to it. The crocodile then bit and pulled its bulgy nose and stretched it out.

From then on, the elephant child was able to stuff large bundles of grass into its mouth with ease.

The truth, of course, is likely to be different to Rudyard Kipling's elephant child story.

And now researchers have sought to understand exactly what that is; and establish why elephants and giraffes have such long trunks and tongues.

The answer lies with the amount of food they need to eat, a new study suggests. It's published in the journal Acta Zoologica.

A team modelled how the tongues and trunks of 18 species of herbivore related to the amount of food they took in while grazing.

The soft body parts – the lips tongues and trunks - are the key to their survival

The elephant's trunk, they found, was vital for it to eat enough food in relation to the size of its mouth. So too was the giraffe's tongue. They also helped the herbivores eat softer, more nutritious plants such as leaves.

The team used a modelling process called allometric scaling, a well-known biological "law" which states that the size of an animal is in proportion to how much it eats.
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Some awesome science facts

We learn about some awesome science facts in high school but there are a lot of other facts that teachers didn't give us and you can know about it here:

1) Collectively Speaking, Humans Have Spent Longer Playing World Of Warcraft (Over 6 Million Years) Than We Have Existed As A Species Separate From Chimpanzees.

2) A Dog Has The Same Ecological Footprint As Two Toyota Landcruisers; A Has Cat The Same Environmental Effect As A Volkswagen Golf; Two Hamsters The Same As A Plasma TV.

3) In 1251, Henry III Was Given A Polar Bear By The King Of Norway. He Kept It In The Tower Of London, On A Long Chain So That It Could Swim In The Thames.

4) Until The 1960′S, The Only Reliable Pregnancy Test Was To Inject A Woman’s Urine Into A Female African Clawed Frog. If The Woman Was Pregnant, The Frog Would Ovulate Within 12 Hours.

5) About 65 Billion Neutrinos Will Pass Through Your Fingernail In A Second

6) If All The LEGO Bricks Ever Manufactured Were Clipped On Top Of One Another, They Would Make A Tower Ten Times As High As The Distance To The Moon.

7) Light Would Take .13 Seconds To Travel Around The Earth.

8) If You Drilled A Tunnel Straight Through The Earth And Jumped In, It Would Take You Exactly 42 Minutes And 12 Seconds To Get To The Other Side.

9) A Medium-Sized Cumulus Cloud Weighs About The Same As 80 Elephants.

10) A Single Bolt Of Lightning Contains Enough Energy To Cook 100,000 Pieces Of Toast.

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The reason why human unable to fly?

Let’s see the answering for an intereting science facts question: Why can human fly?

Although mankind has conquered the skies with airplanes, we have yet to match up to our winged animal counterparts who fly on their own. And now, scientists have determined that we never will: it is mathematically impossible for humans to fly like birds.

A bird can fly because its wingspan and the wing muscle strength are in balance with its body size. It has a lightweight skeleton with hollow bones, which puts a smaller load on its wings. A bird also has air sacs connected to its lungs, which makes it even lighter and allows for easy passage of air through its lungs during flight.

On the other hand, calculations of the ratio between human size and strength reveal that our species will never be able to take flight unaided. As an organism grows, its weight increases at a faster rate than its strength. Thus, an average adult male human would need a wingspan of at least 6.7 meters to fly. This calculation does not even take into account that these wings themselves would be too heavy to function.

There is a reason that a 6-year-old girl can do more pull-ups than her 40-year-old father — she may be weaker, but her strength-to-size ratio is still greater than her father’s ratio. In other words, humans are not too large to fly, but our strength simply cannot support our weight in flight.

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Some fascinating facts of life

If you’re bored and have some minutes to kill, then why not check out this amazing list of the top twenty most random and funny facts.

1. Banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories an hour.
2. In the UK, it is illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day!
3. Pteronophobia is the fear of being tickled by feathers!
4. When hippos are upset, their sweat turns red.
5. A flock of crows is known as a murder.
6. “Facebook Addiction Disorder” is a mental disorder identified by Psychologists.
7. The average woman uses her height in lipstick every 5 years.
8. 29th May is officially “Put a Pillow on Your Fridge Day“.
9. Cherophobia is the fear of fun.
10. Human saliva has a boiling point three times that of regular water.
11. If you lift a kangaroo’s tail off the ground it can’t hop.
12. Hyphephilia are people who get aroused by touching fabrics.
13. Billy goats urinate on their own heads to smell more attractive to females.
14. The person who invented the Frisbee was cremated and made into frisbees after he died!
15. During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.
16. If Pinokio says “My Noes Will Grow Now”, it would cause a paradox. Details here.
17. Polar bears can eat as many as 86 penguins in a single sitting. (If they lived in the same place)
18. King Henry VIII slept with a gigantic axe beside him.
19. Bikinis and tampons invented by men.
20. An eagle can kill a young deer and fly away with it.

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