Great news: the Healthy Dog Importation Act was reintroduced on June 29th by Representatives Kurt Schrader and Dusty Johnson. This bipartisan legislation establishes commonsense health and vaccination requirements for all dogs imported into the United States.
Currently, there is shortage of dogs in the United States, with more than a million being imported into the country annually to meet demand. Unfortunately, many of these dogs are imported - some with falsified records - from countries where rabies or other dangerous pathogens or pests are endemic. This legislation will help unify our current, fragmented system of oversight, and help protect animal and public health.
Humans aren't the only animal to navigate at night using the stars. Birds do it. Dung beetles do it. So do seals and moths - and probably a lot of other animals. This Vox piece primarily focuses on experiments with birds and dung beetles in a planetarium. The experiments showed that Birds orient themselves to a fixed point, like Polaris, while the dung beetles used the moon, and - perhaps surprisingly - the Milky Way to navigate.
Of course, knowing what these animals rely on for navigation is a far cry from understanding the exact mechanisms at play, but it is a fascinating start. It also raises questions about how light pollution, satellites, or other human activities may affect an animal's ability to effectively navigate using the sky.
Working around the clock to find human survivors lost in the Florida building collapse, emergency workers are tasked with an additional mission: to find the lost pets stuck in the rubble. Several residents are desperate to find their animals that may still be alive. Working dogs are on site assisting in the search and rescue of survivors.
We insulate our buildings with the goal of keeping the outside, well... out. But what if buildings were designed to adapt to their environment and feed off all the free light, heat, and cold provided by their surroundings? The savings in energy and equipment costs could be huge. It's a challenging dream, but there may already be solutions out there - provided by animals.
The critically endangered screwhorn antelope, for example, changes its sandy-brown coat to white during the summer, reflecting away the sun's intense heat. Taking a page from this adaptive ruminant, an office building might be fitted with smart windows that regulate reflection and luminosity. Along those same lines, the bearded dragon's ability to regulate its temperature by changing skin color would be useful if applied to rooftops, while the blue jay's famous "puffy coat" of feathers, which traps and heats air in the winter would be a godsend if scalable to insulated walls.
In all of these examples, the animal's ability to change quickly in order to better regulate heat or cold is what gives it an advantage. This is certainly a tall order for large, inorganic structures, but a worthy goal. Perhaps in 20 years, we will look back and ask in wonder "how did anybody survive summers before Addax Windows™ were invented?"
