🐱 The UK's feline extinction plan

Hello 👋 You know how cute is it when your dog wags their tail while sleeping? Well bad news because they had one less hour to get those tail wags in last night thanks to daylight savings.If you're a little extra groggy this morning, it's because you lost an hour of sleep last night. And if you favorite Sunday morning newsletter has a few extra typos, be kind to the writers.Here's what's going on this week:🐔 Mass poultry vaccination campaign 😾 Why the U.K. considered becoming cat-free🖥️ AI driven animal robots🚀 Quick hits

🐔 Mass poultry vaccination campaign

The bird flu outbreak that continues to wreak havoc on farms across the world, has now been classified as the largest outbreak in U.S. history - affecting more than 58 million birds. It has spread to other species such as mink, foxes, raccoons, and bears and driven up egg prices in your local grocery store. And although experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the risk of spiller over into humans sending us into another pandemic is low, other reports are that the H5N1 virus has killed a staggering 53% of the humans it has infected. If the virus were to mutate and be more readily shared between humans - the results could be horrific. Meanwhile, as the New York Times reported, officials at the federal Agriculture Department say they have begun testing potential poultry vaccines and initiated discussions with industry leaders about the logistics of a large-scale bird flu vaccination program for poultry. As we've all seen first hand, any mass vaccination campaign is a contentious issue. Some worry that an avian influenza vaccination program would be too big an undertaking to be effective, others worry it could create trade restrictions and decimate the $6 billion poultry export industry. But avian influenza experts say they believe the administration should move ahead with a vaccination campaign, in part to reduce the risk of a human pandemic.

As animal experts, what do you think is the right move?

😾 Why the U.K. considered becoming cat-free

As shared on Channel 4 and picked up by Time, former Health Minister Lord James Bethel confirmed that the United Kingdom considered exterminating all cats in the early days of the COVID pandemic, in order to limit the spread. Seriously... check it out:

Thankfully smarter heads prevailed and the plan to exterminate all 10+ million cats in Britain (I still can't believe I'm typing those words) was abandoned. I wonder if any veterinarians were consulted in the process, or was One Health policy left solely to the lawmakers?

🖥️ AI driven animal robots

What do you get when you cross a computer scientist and a biologist? Xenobots: Living self-powered robots built form frog cells that evolved by artificial intelligence. Don't worry, you will probably never be asked to treat a pet xenobot, but the medical applications of the technology are pretty interesting. First, let's understand how we got here:

Computer scientist Sam Kriegman and developmental biologist Dr. Josh Bongard began working together in 2017 to create AI systems and robots that could work out in the real world, drawing inspiration from the adaptive nature of natural biology. Dr. Doug Blackistone had seen the ongoing research and realized that the designs being created were similar to what his team could build using frog cells, and went ahead to build a frog tissue version of their theoretical model.The team was excited by the possibility of using the movement seen in a computer simulation to create a real-life copy in the lab.Enter our new best friend: artificial intelligence. The researchers created a behavioral goal for the organisms, which was to walk along the bottom of a petri dish. They then gave parameters to a supercomputer that would run simulations on thousands of different designs to eliminate the poorly performing ones and improve upon the better performing ones. Very Darwinian. Over many "generations", the robot design got better at walking and was able to evolve it's shapes, material properties, and control systems - effectively going through billions of years of evolution all at once.The project has a long way to go and some significant technological and biological hurdles to overcome. For one, walking along the bottom of a petri dish due to cellular contraction is cool, but it's not terribly useful. Researchers are now moving from frog cardiac cells to cilia which allow the cells to swim, as opposed to walk. It also means they can now work on adding sensory capabilities to allow the xenobots to identify external stimuli and react accordingly.If successful, this new frontier could have wide ranging impacts, including the treatment of human and animal disease. Imagine if we could design a xenobot to identify and attack cancerous cells before they spread, or viruses before they mutate.

The full video is about 20 minutes, but if you're interested in the concept it is definitely worth a watch.

🚀 Quick hits

Here are some stories we're following this week from around the veterinary world and animal kingdom:

How does Scotland tackle its vet shortage? [BBC]3D Animation Compares The Size Of 150 Living And Extinct Animals [IFL Science]These Lonely Animals Were the Last of Their Kind [Gizmodo]Advances in the detection, characterization, and monitoring of cancer in pets [DVM 360]