Drones shooting M&Ms to feed prairie dogs in order to save endangered ferrets. It’s quite a story, and it starts with M&Ms being smeared with peanut butter. Apparently you (and I) aren’t the only animals on the planet that like peanut butter and M&Ms.
Thanks to the possibly universal attraction of M&Ms, among mammals anyway, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is planning to use the tempting candy, smeared with vaccine-laced peanut butter, to attract and protect prairie dogs, according to The Guardian.
The purpose of the program is to protect prairie dogs from a plague currently epidemic across the Great Plains. (It’s the sylvatic plague, and yes, it involves the same bacterium that causes bubonic plague in humans.)
The bottom line here, however, is to save ferrets. The black-footed ferret is an endangered species that also suffers from the plague but even worse, faces extinction without prairie dogs. Prairie dogs are a staple in ferret diet and prairie dog burrows give ferrets shelter. So, save the prairie dogs and that will save the ferrets — minus some prairie dogs.
The challenge, however, is to find the most effective way to distribute the M&Ms smeared with vaccine-laced peanut butter to prairie dogs in the wild. You can’t just rain M&Ms over the whole Great Plains. And it would take too many people too long to go the Johnny Appleseed route, walking around and distributing hands full of M&Ms to prairie dog communities. It also wouldn’t work to just dump big piles of M&Ms and hope for the best; wild pigs or other large mammals would show up and eat the whole pile.
The answer? Drones. The Fish and Wildlife Service is working with private contractor to build what agency biologist Randy Machett calls a “glorified gumball machine.” The drones will be rigged to drop M&Ms every 30 feet and fire them left and right — dropping three medicated candies at the same time. They are using a modified fish-bait machine and adding a dye to the smear so the candy will leave telltale signs on the whiskers of prairie dogs that eat the candy.
After an initial trial in Montana, the FWS plans to implement the program to save ferrets in Arizona and Colorado. Early signs look good, according to Machett, who says prairie dogs found the treated M&Ms “delicious” in lab tests.
“It is the fastest, cheapest way to distribute the vaccine,” Machett said. “We are hopeful this oral vaccine will be used to mitigate plague sites and treat tens of thousands of acres each year.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.