NEWS YOU CAN USE: How elephants eat with their trunks.

Why study it?

Elephants are massive, so they need a lot of sustenance. To fill their bellies, they graze on fruits, twigs, tree bark and roots for up to 18 hours per day. To house so much fare, elephants must manipulate their trunks in a way that’s efficient and adept at picking up as many pieces of food as possible at once. David Hu, a mechanical engineer and biologist at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, wanted to know how elephants accomplish such a feat since robotic manipulators face similar challenges.

To build better robots, of course.