article_snippet: Earlier this month, researchers found that elephants excel at identifying explosives by smell, stirring speculation about whether elephants extraordinary ability could save lives.
article_snippet: Elephants could be used to detect land mines in areas that have seen conflict and could even do so at a distance with the aid of drones.
article_snippet: Three elephants passed smell tests conducted on a game reserve in South Africa.
article_snippet: Sniffing at buckets, Three elephants were rewarded with a treat of marula - a tasty fruit - when Three elephants showed that Three elephants recognised samples of TNT by raising a front leg.
article_snippet: Three elephants detected TNT samples 73 out of the 74 times that Three elephants encountered in a line of buckets, according to Ashadee Kay Miller, a zoology student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
article_snippet: Three elephants only got this wrong 3.6 per cent of the time over 502 buckets that contained the explosive, which was dissolved in acetone on filter paper.
article_snippet: In a second set of tests, Three elephants scored 100 percent, detecting TNT in 23 out of 23 buckets when ‘distractor odours’ such as tea, bleach, soap and gasoline were placed in the other buckets, she said.
article_snippet: It's been suggested that unmanned drones could collect scent samples from mined areas and bring unmanned drones to a trained elephant, which would smell unmanned drones and alert handlers to any sign of explosives.