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African forest elephants are being poached out of existence. A new study with of largest dataset on forest elephants ever compiled reveals a loss of more than 60% in the past decade, due to slaughtering them for their ivory tusks. The decline is documented throughout forest elephant’s range in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, and Republic of Congo.

Distinct from the African savannah elephant, the African forest elephant is slightly smaller than its better known relative and is considered by many to be a separate species. They play a vital role in maintaining the biodiversity of one of the Earth’s critical carbon sequestering tropical forests.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover has bored into a Martian rock and pulled out its first sample of the planet’s insides to analyze. This could be the first step to mining Mars.

In New Scientist, Lisa Grossman quotes NASA’s Louise Jandura as saying, "This is the only time anybody’s drilled into Mars. Getting deeper into the rock allows us to unlock a kind of time capsule into what Mars was like 3 or 4 billion years ago."
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Why make tiny flying drones when you can fly REAL insects by remote-control? In 2006, DARPA asked US scientists to submit "innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs"–tiny flying robots that can perform surveillance in dangerous territory. One there was a big problem: Since they couldn’t carry much fuel, they couldn’t stay in the air very long. The solution? Use real bugs.

In the February 16th edition of the Observer, Emily Anthes quotes DARPA engineer Amit Lal as saying, "Proof of existence of small-scale flying machines is abundant in nature in the form of insects."
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Great strides are being made, when it comes to creating invisibility.

Baile Zhang, a scientist from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, caused his audience to gasp when he demonstrated the following experiment: He used a small box made of calcite optical crystal to bend light around an object, making anything placed behind the box invisible to people watching the demonstration

The March 1st edition of the Telegraph quotes Zhang as saying he created the device "just for fun. I just think the idea is cool. Plus, I hope this work will demonstrate that simple tools can sometimes fulfill important functions that previously required complicated methods.
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