Known affectionately as “the girls,” Ruth and Emily have a lot of fund for two Asian elephants. Ages 54 and 48, they spend their days tinkering with an array of special toys at the Buttonwood Park Zoo in Massachusetts.
No mere plastic playthings, these toys have been engineered to appeal to the pachyderms’ social nature, psychology and intelligence.
The toymakers are students from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, assigned to create elephant gadgets after research expeditions to the zoo. “The class discovered that the elephants first want to play with a new object in the yard, then try to eat it,” says Professor Rick Brown. That’s why a crank-operated canister is packed with popcorn; other toys have fruit tucked inside. Typically the elephants find and finish off the treats within a half hour, says zoo director William Langbauer. He reports that the girls haven’t rejected any toy yet but sometimes use them in surprising ways. A steel box with the word “elephant” cut into it, for example, is meant to be a puzzle. Emily prefers to bang it like a drum.

by CATHERINE ZUCKERMAN

Before they even had pots to cook it in, ancient Peruivians knew the joys of eating popcorn. So says a team of scientists who have found fossilized cobs, husks, stalks and tassels dating back 6,700 years – ahead of the arrival of ceramics – along the northern coast of Peru. The remains, the oldest ever identified in South America, help put the now ubiquitous crop’s chronology in order. According to study co-author Tom Dillehay, the findings place maze in the area 2,000 years earlier than previous discoveries had indicated.
So how did these people pop kernels without cookware? Burned cobs suggest they used heated stones (which were also found with scorch marks). As to consumption practices, Dillehay says popcorn wasn’t likely a habitual indulgence but rather signaled a special occasion.

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