Showing posts with label Washington state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington state. Show all posts

Friday, October 3, 2025

Dogs and drones: how scientists are saving Washington’s endangered orcas; The Guardian, October 2, 2025

 The Guardian; Dogs and drones: how scientists are saving Washington’s endangered orcas

"Dressed in a bright orange lifejacket – and sometimes goggles – Eba perches atop Giles’s research boat, scanning the wind. When she catches a whiff of orca faeces, she raises her nose, sometimes whimpering or wagging her tail to point Giles in the right direction. Orca-detecting dogs have become an unlikely ally in the fight to save the whales.

“We wanted to use Eba because it allows us to stay really far away from the whales and not stress them out,” says Giles, a member of the marine conservation organisation SeaDoc Society.

Through the study of whale faeces, researchers can uncover a wealth of biological insights from a single sample, including diet, hormone levels, exposure to toxins, pregnancy, gut microbiome composition and the amount of microplastics in their system, as well as the presence of parasites, bacteria and fungi...

Out on the boat with Giles are James Sheppard, a scientist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and Charlie Welch, an SDZWA volunteer and head of Proper Voltage, a company focused on sustainable battery technology. Together, they have spent a decade developing conservation drones that can capture samples of the cloud-like plumes of breath from orcas’ blowholes with mounts holding petri dishes.

Sheppard says: “We need to get data that is robust and as close to real-time as possible, so that we can find out if there’s a real problem. Then the animal-care staff can go in and stage an intervention if it’s needed.”"

Monday, August 28, 2023

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Why Scanning Your Fingerprint Could Cost You Your Privacy; Inc.com, May 23, 2017

Adam Levin, Inc.com; Why Scanning Your Fingerprint Could Cost You Your Privacy

"Scanning a fingerprint or even an eyeball to authenticate your identity is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Biometric identification has been in practical use for a while now, and the technology gets more sophisticated every day.

It should come as no surprise that security and privacy concerns have arisen along the way. And now the legal ramifications are rapidly getting more complicated.

Washington state lawmakers last month passed pioneering legislation that forbids companies from obtaining or selling biometric information without consent of the individual."