Though it looks more like Dr. Octopus' mechanical tentacles from "Spiderman," a flexible, robotic arm recently developed by German automation company Festo was actually fashioned after an elephant's ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. FILE PHOTO: An Asian elephant dries off with some sand in his enclosure at the zoo in Karlsruhe July 7, 2011. REUTERS/Alex ...

New research reveals that elephant trunk whiskers are unlike any other animal's, and could inspire a new generation of robots.

The elephant has a secret hiding right on its nose. Its famous trunk, full of muscle and devoid of bone, can move in a virtually infinite number of directions and is capable of performing an array of ...

In A Nutshell Elephant whiskers have “physical intelligence”: Three built-in gradients (geometry, porosity, and stiffness) ...

A new study suggests that an elephant's muscles aren't the only way it stretches its trunk -- its folded skin also plays an important role. The combination of muscle and skin gives the animal the ...

There’s a Sherlock Holmes tale in here somewhere: A clever observer could check wrinkles and whiskers on an elephant trunk to catch a left-trunker pachyderm perp masquerading as a righty, thanks to a ...

Elephant trunks may be one of the most sensitive body parts in the animal kingdom. Michael Brecht at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin and his colleagues dissected the ...