Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Elephant corpses are centres of attraction for living elephants. They will visit them repeatedly, sniffing them with their trunks and rumbling as they do so. This is a species-specific response; elephants show no interest in the dead of any other type of animal. And they also react to elephant bones, as well as bodies, as Dr Wittemyer has demonstrated. Prompted by the anecdotes of others, and his own observations that an elephant faced with such bones will often respond by scattering them, he laid out fields of bones in the bush. Wild elephants, he found, can distinguish their conspecifics' skeletal remains from those of other species. And they do, indeed, pick them up and fling them into the bush.

Coca-Cola distribution is so broad, its marketing so expert that the Gates Foundation has urged vaccine campaigns to mimic its strategy.

Across the planet, 1.8bn human beings drink water contaminated with faeces.

Death through overwork is considered to be such a feature of the workplace in Japan that there is a word for it: karoshi.

Humans have always sought to intoxicate themselves.

Looking after someone with dementia can wipe out even a prosperous family.

The promise of a longer life, well lived, would round a person out. But this vision of the future depends on one thing – that a long existence is also a healthy one. Humanity must avoid the trap fallen into by Tithonus, a mythical Trojan who was granted eternal life by the gods, but forgot to ask also for eternal youth. Eventually, he withered into a cicada.

In 2016 a coroner's office in Ohio had to store corpses in refrigerated lorries for a week because residents were overdosing on opioids faster than their bodies could be processed.

How young is too young? Rich democracies give different answers, depending on the context: in New Jersey you can buy alcohol at 21 and cigarettes at 19, join the army at 17, have sex at 16 and be tried in court as an adult at 14.

Nothing ages faster than yesterday's dreams of tomorrow.

People around the world produce an estimated 6.4 trillion litres of urine every year.

Kids not born in the '90s, also didn't have kids in the 2010s. It's the echo of the echo.

Those who live to be very old are never previously famous. Few in the world know them, and they know almost nothing of the world.

One poll in 2016 found that French people are the most pessimistic on Earth, with 81 % grumbling that the world is getting worse and only 3 % saying that it is getting better.

End-of-life businesses also offer alternatives to costly temple gravestones, such as scattering loved ones' ashes in Tokyo Bay (just don't tell the honeymooners to whom the boat is also offered).

More than 80 % of the candidate drugs that make it into clinical trials because they worked in mice do not go on to work well in humans.

Hospital doctors have far more opportunities to earn substantial kickbacks – try seeing a good specialist in China without offering a fat "red envelope".

Every year 350 tonnes of cigarette butts, the equivalent in weight to two blue whales, are cleared off the streets of Paris alone.

The income-tax code is so knotty that America has as many tax preparers per 1,000 people as Indonesia has doctors.

Diseases compete to kill people as they age; if one does not get you the next will.

Gay men's rate of anal cancer is the same as the rate of cervical cancer for women.

Julius Caesar (at the time in his 50s) swam nearly 300 metres or six lengths of an Olympic pool with his sword and purple cloak clenched between his teeth, apparently holding his official papers dry above his head.