After 20 years away, giant&nbsp;panda Ya Ya returned home on Thursday to a warm welcome and an outpouring of affection from millions of her online and in-person fans.&nbsp;

Ya Ya landed at Shanghai Pudong International Airport in the afternoon following a 16-hour special FedEx aircraft from Memphis, Tennessee, in the United States.

Her Chinese fans expressed their desire to see Ya Ya in good health and living the rest of her life "at home."

Waving at Ya Ya's aircraft before it landed in Shanghai, local resident Cheng Bei told China Daily,&nbsp;"We all hope that either now or in the future, either at home or abroad, giant pandas can receive love and respect from the whole world. I hope that Ya Ya can recover soon and wish her a long life."

As of Thursday evening, the Sina Weibo hashtag "Ya Ya has landed in Shanghai" had received 430 million views.

Top comments included "After 20 years, our baby finally back" and "I was moved to tears by her return."

Ya Ya is extremely popular in China, but animal specialists say fans will have to wait to see the giant&nbsp;panda because she requires time to adjust to her new living environment.

ALSO READ |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/penguin-pioneer-wobbly-penguin-becomes-first-in-world-to-undergo-mri-scan-in-uk-586534">'Penguin pioneer': Wobbly penguin becomes first in world to undergo MRI scan in UK</a>

The panda&nbsp;reached an old age at the age of 23, the equal of nearly 80 human years.

According to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, Ya Ya was born at the Beijing Zoo and transferred to the Memphis Zoo in Tennessee in 2003 for a joint research and conservation work.&nbsp;

Sun Quanhui, a scientist at World Animal Protection told China Daily that&nbsp;Ya Ya will have to adapt to a new living environment, which may take a while,&nbsp;as she had lived in a different country&nbsp;for 20 years.

"During the time (of adapting), tourists should minimize her disturbance and breeders need to provide her with nutritious food and a suitable living environment to help her get accustomed to the new environment as soon as possible," he said.

Under Chinese regulations, Ya Ya must be quarantined for 30 days to determine whether she has any unknown infections, he said.

Shanghai Zoo has set out a unique quarantine area for Ya Ya, complete with dwellings, sports areas, and food-processing rooms. A significant quantity of bamboo and other food has also been prepared. According to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, throughout the quarantine period, a team of panda experts from Beijing Zoo would be on standby 24 hours a day.

After Ya Ya has completed her quarantine, she will be sent to the Beijing Zoo, where living quarters, medical services, and food supplies have been provided.

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After 20 years away, giant panda Ya Ya returned home on Thursday to a warm welcome and an outpouring of affection from millions of her online and in-person fans.

After 20 years away, giant panda Ya Ya returned home on Thursday to a warm welcome and an outpouring of affection from millions of her online and in-person fans. Ya Ya landed at Shanghai Pudong International Airport in the afternoon following a 16-hour special FedEx aircraft from Memphis, Tennessee, in the United States. Her Chinese fans expressed their desire to see Ya Ya in good health and living the rest of her life "at home." Waving at Ya Ya's aircraft before it landed in Shanghai, local resident Cheng Bei told China Daily, "We all hope that either now or in the future, either at home or abroad, giant pandas can receive love and respect from the whole world. I hope that Ya Ya can recover soon and wish her a long life." As of Thursday evening, the Sina Weibo hashtag "Ya Ya has landed in Shanghai" had received 430 million views. Top comments included "After 20 years, our baby finally back" and "I was moved to tears by her return." Ya Ya is extremely popular in China, but animal specialists say fans will have to wait to see the giant panda because she requires time to adjust to her new living environment. ALSO READ | 'Penguin pioneer': Wobbly penguin becomes first in world to undergo MRI scan in UK The panda reached an old age at the age of 23, the equal of nearly 80 human years. According to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, Ya Ya was born at the Beijing Zoo and transferred to the Memphis Zoo in Tennessee in 2003 for a joint research and conservation work. Sun Quanhui, a scientist at World Animal Protection told China Daily that Ya Ya will have to adapt to a new living environment, which may take a while, as she had lived in a different country for 20 years. "During the time (of adapting), tourists should minimize her disturbance and breeders need to provide her with nutritious food and a suitable living environment to help her get accustomed to the new environment as soon as possible," he said. Under Chinese regulations, Ya Ya must be quarantined for 30 days to determine whether she has any unknown infections, he said. Shanghai Zoo has set out a unique quarantine area for Ya Ya, complete with dwellings, sports areas, and food-processing rooms. A significant quantity of bamboo and other food has also been prepared. According to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, throughout the quarantine period, a team of panda experts from Beijing Zoo would be on standby 24 hours a day. After Ya Ya has completed her quarantine, she will be sent to the Beijing Zoo, where living quarters, medical services, and food supplies have been provided. WATCH WION LIVE HERE:

Shanghai's giant panda Ya Ya is back home, after 20 years in US

Sheep are surprisingly smart. New research from the University of Cambridge shows the animals can learn to recognise people from photographs, even people they&rsquo;ve never seen in real life, such as celebrities.

The researchers tested the sheeps&rsquo; recognition abilities using images of famous people including Barack Obama, actors Emma Watson and Jake Gyllenhaal, and UK newsreader Fiona Bruce. While this is an amusing way to demonstrate what sheep can do, the research could actually have serious uses.

For one thing, increasing our understanding of sheep&rsquo;s perceptual abilities could be used to argue for improved animal welfare. But sheep are also being used as models for understanding brain disorders such as Huntingdon&rsquo;s disease and Parkinson&rsquo;s disease, along with psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. So, learning more about their cognitive capacities could aid the work in this field.

In 2001, the Cambridge team showed that sheep could discriminate between photos of familiar sheep and humans and respond to the emotions portrayed in these photos. But they wanted to see whether sheep could actually recognise the people rather than just memorise familiar photos.

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They used a computer screen to show eight Welsh mountain sheep the celebrity pictures and then used food rewards to train the animals to select these familiar faces from a wider selection of pictures of other people and objects. The sheep could recognise the celebrities even though they had never met them personally and had only been introduced to a face-on photo. Incidentally, the sheep didn&rsquo;t appear to have a preference for Emma, Barack, Fiona or Jake.

To see if the sheep were actually recognising people, rather than just memorising certain images, the researchers showed them photos of the celebrities taken from different angles. The sheep were able to correctly identify the celebrity 80 per cent of the time, dropping to 66 per cent for photos taken at a different angle. This compares to rates of 90 per cent and 76 per cent in humans.

This is an enviable record for the sheep given that they are recognising the faces of another species. (How many humans could recognise different sheep from their photos?) This sound scientific set-up was also able to time the sheep&rsquo;s responses, showing they appeared as confident whether looking at the face in the same position as the original photo or from a different angle.

There was one final surprise for the sheep. After proving they could recognise faces of people they&rsquo;d never met from two-dimensional photos, the sheep were shown pictures of their regular human handler. Although they hadn&rsquo;t been trained to recognise these images, they selected them over the unfamiliar photos anyway.

Smart sheep

I was asked if, as an Ig Nobel laureate myself, I thought this recent Cambridge sheep study would be a contender for an Ig Nobel award, the prize for science that &ldquo;first makes you laugh, then makes you think&rdquo;. Celebrity-spotting sheep might sound funny but the science involved in this study actually isn&rsquo;t sniggerable.

First, it makes an interesting contribution to animal science, showing sheep have much greater cognitive abilities than many people realise. This includes farmers, who often manage hundreds of animals with little actual contact, in the presence of dogs and during unpleasant experiences such as worming or shearing. This means sheep are usually at their least composed around humans, without the inclination to show off their impressive cognitive capacities.

My own work and that of colleagues in Scotland has found that ewes can identify pain in their lambs who have undergone tail docking or castration. Another recent study demonstrated that it is possible that sheep have a sense of self and can recognise themselves in a mirror &ndash; something we only know is possible in very few species, including chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants and magpies.

Learning more about sheep&rsquo;s cognitive abilities could also feed into work on using their brains to study neurological conditions in humans. We know that the neural networks that sheep&rsquo;s brains use for face perception are similar to those used by human brains. That means that we might be able to use sheep to test treatments for human diseases where patients lose the ability to recognise faces or emotions, such as Huntington&rsquo;s disease.

If sheep were on the Ig Nobel judging panel, they would laugh at the idea that people are surprised at their abilities. (And we know that animals really can laugh. And they might also be interested to know that Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded for studies showing many human identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually. Or that humans with an itch on the left side of their body, can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching their right side. This research suggests that actually, humans aren&rsquo;t as good at visual recognition as we perhaps think.

This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" rel="nofollow" target="blank">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/sheep-can-recognise-celebrities-from-photographs-says-amusing-study-with-serious-potential-87032" rel="nofollow" target="blank">original article</a>.

Image Credit:&nbsp;Shutterstock

It's no surprise sheep can recognise people ? their intelligence is often overlooked

Sheep are surprisingly smart. New research from the University of Cambridge shows the animals can learn to recognise people from photographs, even people they’ve never seen in real life, such as celebrities. The researchers tested the sheeps’ recognition abilities using images of famous people including Barack Obama, actors Emma Watson and Jake Gyllenhaal, and UK newsreader Fiona Bruce. While this is an amusing way to demonstrate what sheep can do, the research could actually have serious uses. For one thing, increasing our understanding of sheep’s perceptual abilities could be used to argue for improved animal welfare. But sheep are also being used as models for understanding brain disorders such as Huntingdon’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, along with psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. So, learning more about their cognitive capacities could aid the work in this field. In 2001, the Cambridge team showed that sheep could discriminate between photos of familiar sheep and humans and respond to the emotions portrayed in these photos. But they wanted to see whether sheep could actually recognise the people rather than just memorise familiar photos. × They used a computer screen to show eight Welsh mountain sheep the celebrity pictures and then used food rewards to train the animals to select these familiar faces from a wider selection of pictures of other people and objects. The sheep could recognise the celebrities even though they had never met them personally and had only been introduced to a face-on photo. Incidentally, the sheep didn’t appear to have a preference for Emma, Barack, Fiona or Jake. To see if the sheep were actually recognising people, rather than just memorising certain images, the researchers showed them photos of the celebrities taken from different angles. The sheep were able to correctly identify the celebrity 80 per cent of the time, dropping to 66 per cent for photos taken at a different angle. This compares to rates of 90 per cent and 76 per cent in humans. This is an enviable record for the sheep given that they are recognising the faces of another species. (How many humans could recognise different sheep from their photos?) This sound scientific set-up was also able to time the sheep’s responses, showing they appeared as confident whether looking at the face in the same position as the original photo or from a different angle. There was one final surprise for the sheep. After proving they could recognise faces of people they’d never met from two-dimensional photos, the sheep were shown pictures of their regular human handler. Although they hadn’t been trained to recognise these images, they selected them over the unfamiliar photos anyway. Smart sheep I was asked if, as an Ig Nobel laureate myself, I thought this recent Cambridge sheep study would be a contender for an Ig Nobel award, the prize for science that “first makes you laugh, then makes you think”. Celebrity-spotting sheep might sound funny but the science involved in this study actually isn’t sniggerable. First, it makes an interesting contribution to animal science, showing sheep have much greater cognitive abilities than many people realise. This includes farmers, who often manage hundreds of animals with little actual contact, in the presence of dogs and during unpleasant experiences such as worming or shearing. This means sheep are usually at their least composed around humans, without the inclination to show off their impressive cognitive capacities. My own work and that of colleagues in Scotland has found that ewes can identify pain in their lambs who have undergone tail docking or castration. Another recent study demonstrated that it is possible that sheep have a sense of self and can recognise themselves in a mirror – something we only know is possible in very few species, including chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants and magpies. Learning more about sheep’s cognitive abilities could also feed into work on using their brains to study neurological conditions in humans. We know that the neural networks that sheep’s brains use for face perception are similar to those used by human brains. That means that we might be able to use sheep to test treatments for human diseases where patients lose the ability to recognise faces or emotions, such as Huntington’s disease. If sheep were on the Ig Nobel judging panel, they would laugh at the idea that people are surprised at their abilities. (And we know that animals really can laugh. And they might also be interested to know that Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded for studies showing many human identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually. Or that humans with an itch on the left side of their body, can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching their right side. This research suggests that actually, humans aren’t as good at visual recognition as we perhaps think. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Image Credit: Shutterstock

Sheep can recognise celebrities from photographs

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Shanghai's giant panda Ya Ya is back home, after 20 years in US

Sheep can recognise celebrities from photographs