Rhino

Rock solid on the outside, soft and inviting on the inside — it's the formula behind any good 4x4 expedition vehicle, especially the Krug Project Rhino. The rugged Mercedes-based Rhino stands up for sustainable tourism and anti-poaching efforts.

Do beards to protect our faces from punches? Does corruption in a given country correlate with how obese its politicians are? And why are scientists hanging rhinos off helicopters upside-down? These are a few of this year's Ig Nobel Prize winners.

It's important to track the whereabouts of endangered black rhinos, but doing so in the wilds of Namibia can be difficult – particularly if you don't want to tag the animals. That's where a new footprint identification system is made to come in.

We're used to thinking of fakes and forgeries with disdain, but a new innovation from the University of Oxford looks set to buck that trend: fake rhinoceros horn. Rhino populations have been devastated by poaching due to demand for their horn.

Scientists are trying to save the northern white rhino from extinction, using artificial insemination.

Scientists are reporting a promising breakthrough in the battle for the survival of the functionally extinct northern white rhino, producing first-of-a-kind test tube embryos they claim can offer a high probability of pregnancy in a surrogate mother.​

​​After almost a decade of careful safeguarding in a Kenyan conservancy, the last male northern white rhino on Earth has been euthanized following age-related complications. The death of "Sudan" leaves conservationists with advanced IVF treatments as the only hope of saving the subspecies.

Waste products seem to take on a special meaning in the animal kingdom. A new study has dug deeper into this phenomenon, examining rhino dung samples and finding that they serve as information centers to determine things like the sex, fertility, and territorial ambitious of the recently relieved. ​

The northern white rhino is right on the edge of extinction, but a team of scientists believes it might still be possible to bring the species back from the brink, with hopes of using stored genetic information to produce a new population.

A new initiative is looking to make life difficult for poachers, by fitting out an African nature reserve with high-tech gear, such as seismic sensors and infrared drones, all of which is networked to keep tabs on who is going in and out of the park.

With the ability to patrol from the air, an application for drones with huge potential is wildlife conservation. AREND is an international team of students currently developing an unmanned aerial system, with the ultimate objective of combatting poaching in Africa's national parks.

With its recent field testing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to protect an ailing rhino population, California-based Airware is determined to help shed some of the negative connotations surrounding UAVs.