Muse
News
;;;;;An Elephant
NeverSleeps
ARE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST
LAND ANIMALS also its
shortest sleepers? A study of
wild African elephants suggests
that may be the case.
Researchers tracked down
two female elephants in a park
in Botswana and gave them
GPS collars. h ey also
temporarily implanted an
activity tracker (similar to a
FitBit) in each elephant’s trunk.
Elephants constantly wave and
wiggle their trunks while
they’re awake. So by recording
when the elephants’ trunks
were still, the scientists could
measure how much they slept.
Over the next month, the two
elephants averaged only two
hours of sleep per night. h at’s
less than any other mammal
that scientists have studied.
h ey usually slept standing up,
not lying down. And the
scientists were surprised to see
that each elephant pulled a few
all-nighters. h ey might have
skipped sleep on those nights
because they were busy leading
their herds away from lions—or
from humans hunting illegally.30#05*$Holy Bat Bot!That’s the news!
Go to page 39 to see
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false story.IF YOU HEAR ABOUT A PERSON
who’s “really, really smart,” do
you picture a man or a woman?
Kids who DUHğYH\HDUVROG
usually guess this person is their
own gender, whether they’re
boys or girls. But at age six, girls
are more likely to assume than
they were before that the “really,
really smart” person is male,
researchers found.
In another experiment,
scientists asked kids if they
wanted to play a game. When
they described the game as being
for “children who are really,
really smart,” six-year-
old girls were less
interested in playing
than boys were.A NEW lightweight robot called Bat Bot uses many-jointed
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already learned false stereo-
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brilliant than men. The
researchers think this could
stop girls from studying
subjects like math or physics
when they’re older.14:$)0-0(:Girls DoubtTheir Smarts