Name: Why Pandas are unlike any other bear | February 5, 2026
Uploaded: 2026-02-09T14:21:21.000Z
Duration: 9 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We are here with your 10 minutes of news.

Hope you are having an awesome, fantastic, phenomenal day.

My family is trying to convince me that we should get one and I'm thinking some big old dog, but

they keep showing me these pictures of these teeny, tiny Pomeranians and I do not know how I feel about that.

Anyways, I was just thinking about this because our lead story today is about a breed of robot dogs.

Now, we've shown you a lot of videos of robo dogs being introduced at tech shows or being tested in the lab.

But today we're getting a look at a new fleet being put into action in the real world.

Working in forests, this pack is heading out into the wilderness, using cameras and lasers to map trees in ways humans maybe never could.

Here's how the Oxford Robotics Institute is giving Forest Management a whole new pawspective.

They do look and feel very much like robot dogs.

When we go to the forest or to the park sometimes just to test the robots, we do attract attention not only of the dog owners, but

So they, they tend to come close and then sniff around the robot.

Of course, our robots can't understand this yet.

So my name is Nivet Chebrolu and I'm a senior researcher here at the Oxford Robotics Institute.

This is a robot platform that we've been using in order to do the forestry mapping.

There are about eight cameras on the device which are used for obstacle detection, as well as other cameras which are more high resolution for.

For understanding the trees and the environment around us.

Lasers, scanners, as well as inertial measurement units.

Once we have all this data, as the robot is moving, we can stitch together to create a 3D map of the environment.

The goal of the Digiforest project was to build digital models of forests using cameras and lasers on a variety of different robot platforms.

So with more detailed robot reconstructions of the forest, we're able to more quickly identify when there is maybe disease or whether a tree is damaged or could be helped, or whether it could be harvested for its wood.

Forest management has used measuring tapes for over 100 years.

And this use of Quadruped robots will transform the way it's carried out.

With this, as the robot is walking, you densely map the entire region so you get a per tree inventory.

So we're able to monitor it at a much higher resolution than what we were able to do.

So I think we now have a kind of a fully functional system that's able to map a hectare maybe in 20 minutes.

So when you have four points of contact, it's naturally stable compared to a humanoid kind of a robot, which is two legs.

So just energy wise, it's much more efficient to have a four legged robot, especially in uneven terrain.

The cost of these walking platforms is falling dramatically with longer battery life with different battery technology.

It's not one you're likely to come across when you go down to the woods today, but

A giant pandas diet consists of almost exclusively kwat, tree bark, berries, bamboo or insects.

There is no bamboozling you if you said bamboo.

Pandas spend up to 16 hours a day feasting on the woody grass.

A full grown panda can eat up to 100 pounds of bamboo per day.

For the first time in decades, there are no giant pandas in Japan.

The last pair were sent back to their ancestral home in China.

The twin pandas were born in Tokyo, but only under Beijing's long running panda diplomacy program.

They still belong to China and the agreement to send them back reached its deadline.

Crowds gathered at the Tokyo Zoo to bid farewell to a pair of four year old pandas last week.

For the first time in half a century, Japan will be pandalis as its last two cubs, Xiao Ziao and Leilei, are leaving for China.

We always said there's a panda here so we'll get to see it sometime.

News of the twins departure has drawn fans from across the country, some waiting hours for a final glimpse.

Though they were born In Tokyo in 2021, the Cubs were always meant to return this year to their motherland, which loans the bears as goodwill ambassadors and to strengthen trade ties.

But as tensions between Japan and China deepen, prospects for another panda loan seem increasingly far fetched.

It feels like such a cute, innocent animal is being used as a trump card or weapon.

Relations between the two countries are at their lowest point in years after Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in parliament that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response.

China, which claims Taiwan as its own, considers the issue a red line and has responded with a flurry of economic pressure tactics like cutting flights, warning citizens against traveling to Japan and suspending seafood imports.

Now the panda's departure, though pre Planned feels like yet another blow.

At the operational level, we don't know if we'll get more pandas.

But we hope to continue working with China on conservation and breeding research in the future.

Japan first welcomed pandas in 1972 to mark the normalization of ties with China.

What followed was decades of panda fever.

With the zoo's surrounding neighborhood transformed by tourism and and panda themed merchandise.

Tens of millions of dollars are generated each year from the panda economy, according to one economist's estimates.

But with no new bear loan In Sight, Japan's 50 year chapter of Panda diplomacy comes to a close.

Even though giant pandas eat a prolific amount of bamboo, they can only digest about 17% of it.

That is because despite evolving to be herbivores, they've retained a short digestive tract normally seen in carnivores.

This, combined with a fiber rich diet means pandas are prodigious producers of excrement.

An adult panda can go number two up to 100 times a day, producing dozens of pounds of waste.

And that's not their only bizarre bathroom habit.

Get this, pandas are also known to urinate while doing a handstand.

Scientists say the unusual act is actually a technique to mark their territory.

The higher the mark, the bigger the panda.

And teachers, I am sorry for any pandemonium the potty talk have caused.

And you won't believe that the dog can't see.

Goose arrived on a Pendleton County, Kentucky farm in 2013, and his owner, Ms.

He was the very first puppy that came and ran up to me and he snatched the harness out of my hands and took off with it.

And I think in that moment I knew that he was mine and I was his.

For more than a decade, Goose has done it all.

Bringing in cattle, helping during planting season, and keeping a close eye on the greenhouse.

That dedication is now earning Goose national attention as one of three finalists for the People's Choice Pup Award.