A 70-year-old woman was trampled to death by a wild elephant in lower Assam's Goalpara district on Friday, a forest department officer said.

The incident took place at around 7 am at Korkuchi in Dohela, divisional forest officer of Goalpara, Jitendra Kumar said.

This is the second instance of death in an elephant attack this month in Goalpara district, where 19 deaths were recorded due to such incidents so far this year, a forest department official said.

Source: PTI

In a tragic incident that occurred on the morning of Sunday October 31 at Shidlaghatta here, a boy died after he was attacked by a pack of stray dogs.

The deceased has been identified as Kalandar Khan (11).

He was studying in fourth standard at Shidlaghatta Urdu higher primary school.

It is said that the father of the boy, who is a daily wage labourer had gone to work on Sunday morning. The boy who came out of the house at the same time was attacked by around 20 stray dogs.

He was severely injured in the attack and collapsed on the road. A passerby chased away the dogs but the boy had breathed his last by then.

Villagers expressed rage at the local administration for not taking any action despite their repeated complaints about street dog menace in the area.

An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them.

"I don't know much about whales. I have never seen a whale in my life," says Michael Bronstein. The Israeli computer scientist, teaching at Imperial College London, England, might not seem the ideal candidate for a project involving the communication of sperm whales. But his skills as an expert in machine learning could be key to an ambitious endeavor that officially started in March 2020: an interdisciplinary group of scientists wants to use artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the language of these marine mammals. If Project CETI (for Cetacean Translation Initiative) succeeds, it would be the first time that we actually understand what animals are chatting about — and maybe we could even have a conversation with them.

It started in 2017 when an international group of scientists spent a year together at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Radcliffe Fellowship, a program that promises "an opportunity to step away from usual routines." One day, Shafi Goldwasser, a computer scientist and cryptography expert also from Israel, came by the office of David Gruber, a marine biologist at City University of New York. Goldwasser, who had just been named the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley, had heard a series of clicking sounds that reminded her of the noise a faulty electronic circuit makes — or of Morse code. That's how sperm whales talk to each other, Gruber told her. "I said, 'Maybe we should do a project where we are translating the whale sounds into something that we as humans can understand,'" Goldwasser recounts. "I really said it as an afterthought. I never thought he was going to take me seriously."

But the fellowship was an opportunity to take far-out ideas seriously. At a dinner party, they presented the idea to Bronstein, who was following recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP), a branch of AI that deals with the automated analysis of written and spoken speech — so far, just human language. Bronstein was convinced that the codas, as the brief sperm whale utterances are called, have a structure that lends them to this kind of analysis. Fortunately, Gruber knew a biologist named Shane Gero who had been recording a lot of sperm whale codas in the waters around the Caribbean island of Dominica since 2005. Bronstein applied some machine-learning algorithms to the data. "They seemed to be working very well, at least with some relatively simple tasks," he says. But this was no more than a proof of concept. For a deeper analysis, the algorithms needed more context and more data — millions of whale codas.

There is a creepy-crawly side effect of last weekend's storm. As Sacramento dries out, the cockroaches are coming out.

After record-breaking rain soaked the Sacramento region last weekend the last thing Bill Adams thought he would have to worry about is a cockroach conundrum.

"I have never seen nothing like that in my life," explained Bill Adams. "They are going everywhere, and they are so fast, it was like oh my goodness," he said.

Heavy rains brought close to a hundred creepy crawlers out of their hiding spaces at the Arcade Creek Kennel that Adams owns.

"It was hard to understand because I had never seen anything like that before. I wasn't sure what was going on or how to handle it," he said.

An invasive species of mosquito from East Asia is slowly spreading throughout Italy and could serve as a vector for viruses, according to a new scientific report.

An article in the Parasites & Vectors scientific journal last week claimed to have evidence that the concerning mosquitos, known as Aedes koreicus, have been expanding toward southwest Italy since being discovered in the north in 2011.

A child who died Wednesday night was apparently attacked by a family dog, the Creek County Sheriff's Office said Thursday.

Details about the child, such as age, were not provided.

The Sheriff's Office said it got a call around 7:20 p.m. about a missing child south of Kiefer. After deputies got there, a family member found the child on the property, and the child was pronounced dead soon after.

The dog is being held at an animal control facility.

At least 11 cows were killed by lightning at the same time.

The incident is said to have happened at about 09:30 October 20, in a rice field in Boeung Tim village, Ta Pon commune, Sangke district, Battambang province.

The cows were killed by lightning as their owners chased them to graze together the fields while others while others were killed while tied up in the barn.

There was heavy thunderstorm in the early hours of Wednesday in some districts in Battambang province.

An elderly woman was mauled to death in a savage dog attack after her carer allegedly left her to wander off.

The carer in Italy is facing jail after she failed to notice that an 89-year-old woman she was supposed to be looking after had wandered out of her bed into a neighbour's garden.

Tragically, the woman was killed by two American Staffordshire Terriers in a vicious dog attack.

The carer only realised what had happened when police called about the attack on Carmen Gorzanelli, 89, in the town of Sassuolo in the province of Modena in Italy on October 12.

The news site Rai reported that the incident occurred after Carmen left her house alone and wandered around her neighbourhood before going into a garden just a few metres from her own house. It is believed that the elderly victim mixed up the two entrances.

Officials say a Grant County woman has died after she was severely injured by a dog bite.

The coroner reports that Kathleen Bertram, 69, was in the living room of a home in the 300 block of High Street in Matthews, holding her 3-year-old granddaughter.

Someone in another room heard screams.

According to Coroner Stephen Dorsey: "At that moment the pit-bull then attacked Kathleen, biting down on her neck."

An infant in the Kodak community of Sevier County died Sunday night in an attack by the family dog.

Sevier County Sheriff's Office deputies were called at about 6:15 p.m. to a home on Apache Lane after the large dog attacked the 6-month-old, police said.

Someone else in the home was hurt trying to protect the child, police said.

The child was pronounced dead at the scene.

The dog was aggressive to emergency responders as well and was put down on site.

The Sevier County Sheriff's Office is investigating.