Unsustainable trade in wildlife is a major threat to biodiversity and is now increasingly prevalent in digital marketplaces and social media. With the sheer volume of digital content, the need for automated methods to detect wildlife trade listings is growing. These methods are especially needed for the automatic identification of wildlife products, such as ivory. We developed machine learning-based object recognition models that can identify wildlife products within images and highlight them. The data consists of images of elephant, pangolin, and tiger products that were identified as being sold illegally or that were confiscated by authorities. Specifically, the wildlife products included elephant ivory and skins, pangolin scales, and claws (raw and crafted), and tiger skins and bones. We investigated various combinations of training strategies and two loss functions to identify the best model to use in the automatic detection of these wildlife products. Models were trained for each species while also developing a single model to identify products from all three species. The best model showed an overall accuracy of 84.2% with accuracies of 71.1%, 90.2% and 93.5% in detecting products derived from elephants, pangolins, and tigers, respectively. We further demonstrate that the machine learning model can be made easily available to stakeholders, such as government authorities and law enforcement agencies, by developing a smartphone-based application that had an overall accuracy of 91.3%. The application can be used in real time to click images and help identify potentially prohibited products of target species. Thus, the proposed method is not only applicable for monitoring trade on the web but can also be used e.g. in physical markets for monitoring wildlife trade.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart have developed a magnetically controlled soft medical robot with a unique, flexible structure inspired by the body of a pangolin. The robot is freely movable despite built-in hard metal components. Thus, depending on the magnetic field, it can adapt its shape to be able to move and can emit heat when needed, allowing for functionalities such as selective cargo transportation and release as well as mitigation of bleeding. This animal looks like a walking pine cone, as it is the only mammal completely covered with hard scales. The scales are made of keratin, just like our hair and nails.

If artificial intelligence is the future, then the future is now. This pandemic has shown us just how fast artificial intelligence, or AI, works and what it can do in so many different ways. Right from the start, AI has helped us learn about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 infections. It's helped scientists analyse the virus' genetic information -- its DNA -- at speed. DNA is the stuff that makes the virus, indeed any living thing, what it is.

In the not-so-distant future, more robots may be interacting with customers at shopping complexes, serving food at restaurants or cleaning floors at offices in Japan amid a serious labor crunch. A hint of what is to come is visible at the International Robot Exhibition 2019, a major biennial robot trade show that kicked off on Wednesday at Tokyo Big Sight. The event runs until Saturday. Featuring a record 637 firms and organizations, some participants said demand for robotics as helping hands in service sectors is rising to compensate for a shortage of workers. Tokyo-based Omron Social Solutions Co. unveiled a robot capable of performing three tasks: cleaning, security and guiding.

The United Nation's Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which last week chose to ban all commercial trade of pangolins, will come to a close today. The pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has been poached to near extinction. Wildlife conservationists hope the ban will help restore the species, which is harvested for meat and scales. But others say trade sanctions aren't enough – that a coordinated effort between governments, businesses, conservationists, and communities will be necessary to save this maligned mammal. "Hopefully this will be followed by increased resources and attention being devoted to saving this well armored – but utterly defensive – and wholly unique species," Jeff Flocken, North American regional director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told Reuters.

Remember that endangered anteater-esque ball of scales from Favreau's recent film, The Jungle Book? Over one million pangolins have likely been poached and illegally traded in the last decade, especially because of their importance in Chinese medicine and food. And the internet hasn't exactly helped its plight. As wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC reports, their researchers investigated 39 Chinese e-commerce websites over June and July 2016; a single survey in the first month alone detected 153 ads for pangolin scales and meat and live specimen from 94 traders across six sites. Virtual wildlife trafficking poses a serious threat to not just the pangolin.