For six hours we shot through the landscape of the Karoo desert in South Africa. Just rocks and sand and baking sun. Knowing our journey was ending, Daniel and I just wanted to remember all we had seen and done. He used a camera. I used words. I had already finished three notebooks and was into the fourth, a beautiful leather notebook I’d bought in a market in Mozambique.

Southern Africa was full of stories. And visions. We were almost drunk on sensations. The roaring of the water at Victoria Falls, the impossible silence of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. And then the other things: dogs in the streets, whole families in Soweto living in one room, a kilometre from clean water.

As we drove towards the setting sun, a quietness fell over us. The road was empty—we hadn’t seen another car for hours. And as I drove, something caught my eye, something moving next to me. I glanced in the mirror of the car; I glanced sideways to the right, and that was when I saw them. Next to us, by the side of the road, thirty, forty wild horses were racing the car, a cloud of dust rising behind them—brown, muscular horses almost close enough to touch them, to smell their hot breath. I didn’t know how long they had been there next to us.     

I shouted to Dan: “Look!”, but he was in a deep sleep, his camera lying useless by his feet. They raced the car for a few seconds, then disappeared far behind us, a memory of heroic forms in the red landscape. When Daniel woke up an hour later I told him what had happened.

“Wild horses?” he said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“I tried. But they were gone after a few seconds.”

“Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”

“You were the one who was sleeping!”

“Typical,” he said. “The best photos are the ones we never take.”

We checked into a dusty hotel and slept the sleep of the dead.

The victims were carried in one by one, their paws burned and fur charred, suffering from heavy loss of water and fear. Their caretakers bandaged their wounds and laid them in baskets with the only thing that was familiar — the leaves of eucalyptus trees.

As destructive fires have burned more than 2 million acres in Australia, dozens of koalas have been rescued from burning trees and ashen ground.

“They are terrified,” said Cheyne Flanagan, clinical director of the Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie, the only one in the world.

Koalas, unlike kangaroos, birds or snakes, do not flee from fires but instead climb trees to the top, where they can roll themselves up into a ball for protection and wait for the danger to pass. But during the destructive fires, such as those that have burned in recent weeks, the animals are far less likely to survive. Even if the fire itself does not reach the tree top, the animals may overheat and fall to the ground, where they can be burned to death.

While koalas have evolved to exist alongside wildfires, the animals are facing new threats not just from climate change but also from human development, which will impair their ability to survive fires.

“We have these unique animals not found anywhere else on this planet, and we’re killing them,” Flanagan said. “This is a big wake-up call.”

Dogs have been man’s best friends for 30,000 years — and now scientists think they know why.

Dogs are usually not relaxed in a lab environment, but with a little petting and lots of treats, they can be trained to sit still even in an MRI (磁共振成像) scanner. That’s how researchers at Hungary’s ELTE University were able to get images of their brains at work.

Researcher Attila Andics said it helped them better understand the dogs’ relationship with humans. “We have known for a long time that dogs and humans share similar social environment, but now our results show that dogs and humans also have similar brain mechanisms (方法；机制) to process social information,” said Andics.

After training 11 dogs to stay motionless while their brains were scanned, the researchers checked their neurological (神经系统的) responses to about 200 emotionally significant sounds, from whining and crying to playful barking and laughing. They then compared the responses from human subjects. They found great similarities. Andics said it opened new possibilities for the research.

“It establishes a foundation of a new branch of comparative neuroscience, because until now it was not possible to measure the brain activities of a non-primate and a primate (灵长类) brain in a single experiment,” said Andies.

Evan Maclean, Professor in Duke University, said that the Hungarian results were an important step forward.

“We’ve known for a long time that dogs have a lot of behavioral similarities compared to humans. But we don’t know anything or very little at least about whether some of these behaviors are represented similarly inside the brain of the dog, so this research is providing a first glimpse into whether these behavioral similarities are underlined by similar neural processes,” said MacLean.

The Hungarian scientists tell ordinary dog owners to treat their dog companions as intelligent friends, not mere animals, because they evidently understand human feelings.