If you fancy getting creative while at home, why not learn how to draw this cute elephant? YouTuber Wennie Liu teaches people how to draw cute things on her Draw So Cute channel, from a bunny ...

Piantadosi demonstrates how this works by fitting a scatterplot of an elephant: How about that? Give me any set of points, and I can describe them precisely with a universal, single-valued equation.

The problem was, however, that few artists in medieval Europe had ever seen a real elephant—instead they created an astonishing variety of fabulous pachyderms that still fascinates today.