If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.

The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.

A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.

Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."

One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.

If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different ...

https://x.com/itsolelehmann/status/2119921162054504747?a=XekWVYatde99s7cVTu4&s=19

Norway now has more than 2,000 underwater AI laser robots shooting lice off its salmon

they're made by a company called Stingray, and they already guard more than 50 million salmon and trout 24/7

the reason is sea lice, tiny parasites that latch onto salmon and feed on them

as few as 11 can kill a small fish, and one pen can hold 150,000 salmon

the usual fix is pumping the fish out and blasting them with warm water or water jets to knock the lice off

but the handling is so rough that Norway's fish health report ranks it the top cause of death in full-grown farmed salmon

so instead, Stingray puts a robot inside the pen that hunts lice one at a time, all day:

> two cameras watch every salmon that swims past

> AI checks two frames to make sure it's really a louse

> then a green laser fires from up to 2 meters away

> the salmon's scales reflect the beam, so the fish swims off fine and the louse is dead

we now live in a ...

Audrey Hepburn's famous slenderness, copied by the fashion world for seventy years, was what was left of a girl who had lived through a winter on tulip bulbs.

In the autumn of 1944 she was fifteen, living with her mother in Arnhem and then at her grandfather's house in Velp, while the battle for the Rhine bridges was fought around them. She had been dancing in blacked-out houses to raise money for the Dutch resistance. That winter the German authorities cut off food to the occupied west of the Netherlands, the canals froze, and the cities fell to a few hundred calories a day.

The Dutch call it the Hunger Winter. People ate whatever they could find. Endive, when there was any. Nettles. Bread made from peas. And tulip bulbs, dug up and peeled, the bitter core cut out, ground into a grey flour that one survivor said tasted of sawdust. The government printed recipes for them.

Her son wrote later that she would spend whole days in bed with a book, trying to stop thinking about food.

When liberation ...