If you want to teach a child what an elephant looks like, you have an infinite number of options. Take a photo from National Geographic, a stuffed animal of Dumbo, or an elephant keychain; show it to the child; and the next time he sees an object which looks like an elephant he will likely point and say the word. Teaching AI what an elephant looks like is a bit different. To train a machine learning algorithm, you will likely need thousands of elephant images using different perspectives, such as head, tail, and profile. But then, even after ingesting thousands of photos, if you connect your algorithm to a camera and show it a pink elephant keychain, it likely won't recognize it as an elephant.

The first elephant to don a prosthetic limb is challenging surgeons to create bigger, better legs. Mosha lost her right foreleg below the knee in a landmine explosion when she was seven months old. Therdchai Jivacate, a surgeon who designs prosthetic legs for humans and other animals, met her in 2007 at the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation in Thailand. "When I saw Mosha, I noticed that she had to keep raising her trunk into the air in order to walk properly," Jivacate told Motherboard. He built a prosthetic leg for Mosha that relieved the strain she had been putting on her limbs and spine.