Two lives were lost in the village of Ulhitiya within 24 hours as a result of wild elephant attacks, highlighting the need to solve the growing conflict.

D.M. Hemalatha, 54, the second casualty in the wild elephant attack, had been living in a neighbour's residence after her house was destroyed by wild elephants last year.

The incident had taken place within a kilometre from the residence of Heen Manika, another resident who was killed by a wild elephant, less than 24 hours earlier.

Meanwhile, an elephant attack was reported from the Kurulubadda area in Polonnaruwa as well.

An extremely rare two-headed calf has been born in North Macedonia.

The baby cow has a condition called polycephaly, and consequently has fused skulls, two pairs of eyes and one pair of ears.

The unique multi-headed animal is even able to suck milk simultaneously using its two mouths, as reported by Reuters.
Farmer Vasko Pestrovski knew something was different when the calf was being born in his barn in Lazec, a small village in the Bitola municipality, last week.

He said: "Early in the morning we heard that the cow was about to deliver. When she delivered, we saw the calf was rather extraordinary, with two heads.

A woman in Indonesia was swallowed whole by a python as she checked on her cornfields last week. According to The Washington Post, citing the Jakarta Post, the woman's name was Wa Tiba and lived on Muna Island off the coast of Sulawesi. She left her home Thursday night to visit her cornfield about a half mile from her home.

Reticulated pythons are common in the area, but it was actually wild boars that Wa had been worried about initially because they'd be destroying her crops, according to the Jakarta Post's report.

When Wa didn't return, her sister went out to find her and found Wa's footprints, flashlight, slippers, and machete. On Friday, 100 villagers from Persiapan Lawela searched the area and found a 23 foot-long snake with a very swollen belly. The villagers killed the snake, cut it open, and found Wa inside intact. She probably didn't die inside the snake: A reticulated python secures its prey with a bite, then wraps its body around the victim, squeezing down until the victim cannot breathe, before consuming, according to the Associated Press.

Pythons are the longest snake in the world and usually only eat smaller mammals. However, a similar incident happened last year to a farmer from the nearby village of Salubiro on Sulawesi Island, according to The Washington Post.

Hunters along the lower Kuskokwim River have been reporting an abundance of ptarmigan this year after a relative dearth of the birds in years prior. But whether that's because there really are more ptarmigan — or if people are just seeing more — is unclear.

Hunting ptarmigan in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta has been relatively easy this year, compared to the last few years.

"This year we've got lot of ptarmigan all over," said Daniel Nelson, an elder who lives in Napakiak. "They were kind of declining in number, you know. The past two or three years I'd go ptarmigan hunting and I'd barely see some, just a few flocks. Most of the time I get home with nothing, but this year I return with average of 12 ptarmigan per trip."

Neither the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service nor the Alaska Department of Fish and Game track the number of ptarmigan in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. However, state biologist Phillip Perry said that based on his own experience and what people are telling him, ptarmigan sightings are much more common this year than in the past five or six years.

Categorization is the brain's tool to organize nearly everything we encounter in our daily lives. Grouping information into categories simplifies our complex world and helps us to react quickly and effectively to new experiences. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now shown that also mice categorize surprisingly well. The researchers identified neurons encoding learned categories and thereby demonstrated how abstract information is represented at the neuronal level.
A toddler is looking at a new picture book. Suddenly it points to an illustration and shouts 'chair'. The kid made the right call, but that does not seem particularly noteworthy to us. We recognize all kinds of chairs as 'chair' without any difficulty. For a toddler, however, this is an enormous learning process. It must associate the chair pictured in the book with the chairs it already knows - even though they may have different shapes or colors. How does the child do that?

The answer is categorization, a fundamental element of our thinking. Sandra Reinert, first author of the study explains: "Every time a child encounters a chair, it stores the experience. Based on similarities between the chairs, the child's brain will abstract the properties and functions of chairs by forming the category 'chair'. This allows the child to later quickly link new chairs to the category and the knowledge it contains."

Our brain categorizes continuously: not only chairs during childhood, but any information at any given age. What advantage does that give us? Pieter Goltstein, senior author of the study says: "Our brain is trying to find a way to simplify and organize our world. Without categorization, we would not be able to interact with our environment as efficiently as we do." In other words: We would have to learn for every new chair we encounter that we can sit on it. Categorizing sensory input is therefore essential for us, but the underlying processes in the brain are largely unknown.

Three men were trampled to death after a wild elephant attacked them in Duigoti village under Ghaisilot police limits under Padampur range today morning.

The deceased has been identified as Mal Seth and Biranchi Kumbhar, both are residents of Umrad village under Raisalpadar grampanchyat and other man had come to visit his relatives house.

Sources said, three had gone to the field to attend nature's call when the wild tusker attacked them and killed them on the spot.

Earlier, also many have been killed due to the elephant attack in the village.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of bizarre, hollow orbs which washed up on a north-east beach this week have been baffling locals.

The unusual grey heart-shaped shells drifting ashore at Fraserburgh have had many walkers scratching their heads over their unusual appearance and sheer amount.

The odd little orbs, covering much of the beach, are actually the ghosts of a species of sea urchin, Echinocardium cordatum, often fondly referred to as "sea potatoes".

In effect, the beach has become a graveyard for the urchins' hollow remains, whose Latin name translates literally to "spiny heart," in a fitting nod to their unusual shape.

Close to 11 a.m. on April 10, a resident of Kushiro City in Hokkaido who had traveled to the mountains to pick edible flora with his wife was attacked by a brown bear and died shortly after. Though his wife called emergency services as soon as she heard her husband scream and witnessed him being attacked by a "black, bear-like animal", he was pronounced dead at the scene. The cause of death appeared to be the crushing of his head and throat.

Though the emergency services who arrived at the scene were unable to locate the animal responsible, this is unfortunately not an especially unexpected occurrence. Experts warn that bears that have just woken up from hibernation are the most likely to encounter humans, as they wander further afield in search of food. Adding to this peril is the fact that brown bear populations are on the rise in Hokkaido, which increases the risk of an encounter.

Charles Mock, 40, died of scalp and facial wounds after managing to call 911 for help

A Montana backcountry guide has died after he was mauled by a large grizzly bear that was probably defending a nearby moose carcass just outside Yellowstone national park, officials said Monday.

Charles "Carl" Mock, 40, who lived in the park gateway community of West Yellowstone, died Saturday, two days after he was attacked while fishing alone in a forested area along the Madison River several miles north of West Yellowstone, said a Gallatin county sheriff's office spokesperson, Christine Koosman.

The male bear, which weighed at least 420 pounds (190kg), was later shot and killed when it charged wildlife workers investigating the attack.

The moose carcass was found about 50 yards (45 meters) from the site of the attack, said a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesperson, Morgan Jacobsen.

The fearsome tyrannosaur dinosaurs that ruled the northern hemisphere during the Late Cretaceous period (66-100 million years ago) may not have been solitary predators as popularly envisioned, but social carnivores similar to wolves, according to a new study.

The finding, based on research at a unique fossil bone site inside Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument containing the remains of several dinosaurs of the same species, was made by a team of scientists including Celina Suarez, U of A associate professor of geosciences.

"This supports our hypothesis that these tyrannosaurs died in this site and were all fossilized together; they all died together, and this information is key to our interpretation that the animals were likely gregarious in their behavior," Suarez said.

The research team also included scientists from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Colby College of Maine and James Cook University in Australia. The study examines a unique fossil bone site inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument called the "Rainbows and Unicorns Quarry" that they say exceeded the expectations raised even from the site's lofty nickname.

"Localities [like Rainbows and Unicorns Quarry] that produce insights into the possible behavior of extinct animals are especially rare and difficult to interpret," said tyrannosaur expert Philip Currie in a press release from the Bureau of Land Management. "Traditional excavation techniques, supplemented by the analysis of rare earth elements, stable isotopes and charcoal concentrations convincingly show a synchronous death event at the Rainbows site of four or five tyrannosaurids. Undoubtedly, this group died together, which adds to a growing body of evidence that tyrannosaurids were capable of interacting as gregarious packs."