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Spotted lanternflies have been making headlines since they were first sighted in the U.S. over a decade ago. The colorful, invasive bugs are a double whammy for fruit trees and other key crops, feeding on sap and leaving sugary excrement that attracts dangerous pathogens and fungi. But the costly insects may have met their match with an unlikely rival: your dog. Dogs have long been professionally trained to help detect invasive species for conservation efforts. What sets a new study, published July 16 in the journal PeerJ Life & Environment, apart is that these are not professionally trained dogs. They are the canine equivalent of citizen scientists, and they were still able to effectively find spotted lanternfly eggs. It was a proof-of-concept study to ask the question: Can we have citizen scientists and their very cool, everyday companion doggos go out and support the effort of conservation work in their home areas? says lead study author Sally Dickinson, an applied animal behaviorist and search-and-rescue dog handler. Its enrichment for their dogs and enrichment for the people as well. Few dogs are trained professionally for conservation efforts, so having everyday companion animals help out makes it a more scalable solution for managing invasive speciesand many owners were excited to take part. A post about the study on social media was shared about a million times, Dickinson says, and researchers were able to create 182 dog-and-handler teams across the country. Some of them were retired working dogs, but many were everyday canines that like to sniff things out for fun. Anytime you can stimulate your dog, its good for them, Bill Wellborn, one of the study participants, said in a statement. Pepe [his Tibetan terrier] obviously enjoys it. And its a way we can take dog skills and training to help our community. The research team gave handlers a sample of spotted lanternflies odor so that they could train their dogs to recognize it. Then, when the teams were ready, they put their odor recognition skills to the test in two evaluations. Indoors, the dogs were able to find the spotted lanternflies eggs 82% of the time, and in the field, 58% of the time. Since the insects lay their eggs in easily overlooked locationsthe undersides of lumber and tree bark crevices, for exampledogs make much more efficient searchers than humans. The canines’ strong performance was not contingent on breed, Dickinson says. Dogs and handlers that have a great relationship, and are able to work as a team, were the ones that did very well in evaluations. Beyond protecting local plants and agricultural crops, the activity can be rewarding and fun for both dogs and humans as they get outside and get to work. There are obviously hundreds of other ways that you could volunteer to protect your local environment, but this is one way that you could do it with your dog, Dickinson says. How cool is that? Go to a winery, work your dog, and have a great day. I mean, it sounds like the perfect life to me.
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E-Commerce
Since the Trump administration first took office, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has followed a similar formula for most of its posts on X, which are typically celebrating mass deportations, using dehumanizing language like criminal illegal aliens, and defending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Recently, though, the account has taken a detour to post a different genre of content: aspirational pro-America artwork. On July 1, the DHS posted an image of a painting by the late Thomas Kinkade titled Morning Pledge, which shows a suburban neighborhood with a church and an American flag. Above it, the DHSs caption reads: Protect the Homeland. Then, on July 14, the DHS followed up with a piece by contemporary artist Morgan Weistling that depicted a family of early settlers in the American West. The painting, which shows two parents holding a newborn baby inside a covered wagon, is captioned: Remember your Homelands Heritage. New Life in a New Land Morgan Weistling. [Screenshot: DHS/X.com] Following the post, Weistling clarified that the DHS used his painting without permission, and that it invented an entirely new title for his work. But beyond ethical concerns about permission and copyright, the DHSs recent posts raise more pressing questions about what kind of America represents the organization’s concept of an ideal place to liveand who is included in that vision. Taken without permission After the DHS posted an image of his work, Weistling took to his official website, as well as to Facebook and Instagram, to set the record straight. (The Facebook and Instagram messages have since been deleted.) [Screenshot: Morgan Weistling/Facebook] So I was having a nice little vacation with my family when I get a message from a friend that the Department of Homeland Security has posted a painting of mine and its going viral, Weistling wrote on his Facebook page. As of this writing, the DHSs post has 19.1 million views and 34,000 likes. In a separate message on his website, Weistling added: They used a painting I did 5 years ago and re-titled it and posted it without my permission. It is a violation of my copyright on the painting. It was a surprise to me and I am trying to gather how this happened and what to do next. [Screenshot: morganweistling.com] According to Weistlings website, the painting used by the DHS is actually titled A Prayer for a New Liferather than the DHSs altered version of New Life in a New Land. This updated title, alongside the caption Remember your Homelands Heritage, places outsized emphasis on the land itself. Taken together with the paintings scene, the post seems to be skirting just around the edge of endorsing manifest destiny, or the assumption of American settlers inherent right to land in the West. Weistling did not immediately respond to Fast Companys request for a comment. A Manifest Destiny aesthetic Since the Trump administration took office in January, the DHS’s X account has become an active forum for the agency to promote President Trump’s mass deportation agenda. In early July alone, the DHS has already posted several images callously shrugging off the human suffering caused by the president’s deportation policies, which, most recently, include a new detention center for migrants built in the Florida Everglades. One repost from the White Houses official account shows a cup of coffee with the phrase Fire up the deportation planes added atop the liquid. Another image shows a border patrol vehicle in the desert, facing a distant sunset. The caption in neon green and white boasts: ZERO Releases in June. Lowest Month of Illegal Alien Encounters EVER. And a third, in a near-parody of this administrations extreme stance on immigration, shows a mock poster of the film E.T. the Extra Terrestrial with the text: Even E.T. knew when it was time to GO HOME. Take control of your departure using the CBP Home App. Between these posts are countless images of Black and brown people arrested by ICE for alleged crimes. The pivot to posting Kinkade’s and Weistlings works might be tonally jarring, but it’s indicative of the broader message the DHS account is trying to send. Weistlings body of work is almost entirely concerned with early American settlerspresenting an uncomplicated view of Americas origins, with scenes featuring a family happily riding west in a stagecoach or a rancher diligently tending his herd. Its a perspective that does not appear to include reference to Indigenous people. Meanwhile, Kinkade, who became notable for commercializing his work in the 80s and 90s, catered specifically to a Christian middle-class audience (a community that he was later criticized for allegedly exploiting). An entire section of his studios website is dedicated to Patriotic Art, the bulk of which highlights iconography like the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and in one instance, Captain America. In Kinkades 2012 obituary in New York magazine, author Jerry Saltz wrote that the artist represented the epitome of sentimental, illustrational, conservative art. Both Weistling and Kinkade present an idyllic (and notably Eurocentric) portrayal of American societyone that, perhaps, evokes a fictional past thats implied by the phrase Make America Great Again. When the DHS urges its followers to Protect the Homeland, the question becomes: protect it for whom?
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E-Commerce
These specialty-made purses double as a mobile DJ kit. That’s because Nik Bentel Studio‘s newest purse, called the Tati Fte Bag, is actually wearable tech. The bag comes in two models: The $350 Speaker Bag, which pairs with bluetooth, and the $400 Mixer Bag, which has four input channels and is compatible with CD players, computers, phones, and amps. The bags started as a thought experiment, Nik Bentel tells Fast Company. “What if your everyday bag looked and felt like a piece of audio gear?” [Photos: Nik Bentel Studio] The resulting bags have room to hold your phone, chapstick, and mints, but they also have about three hours of play time each. Made from an acrylic shell, the material was chosen because it “allowed us to fully lean into the language of tech objects,” Bentel says. “It has this glossy, rigid, futuristic feel that instantly evokes gadgetry and display cases.” [Photo: Nik Bentel Studio] This is a purse meant to look like a gadget, not the other way around. “We wanted the bags to feel like they were pulled directly from a DJ booth,” Bentel says. Using fabric or leather would have softened the concept too much while acrylic gave the bags a “clean, synthetic, almost sci-fi finish.” The biggest challenges were precision, since acrylic has to be cut perfectly, and scale. [Photo: Nik Bentel Studio] “We wanted them to feel bold and graphic, but still functional as bags,” he says. “And of course, getting the buttons, knobs, and laser-etched details just right took a lot of back-and-forth to make sure they captured that playful realism.” Bentel has made clever, whimsical bags before like one made out of electrical cords and another for a single slice of pizza. The Tati Fte Bag brings that same sense of humor to sound. The rise of digital music and streaming has put a premium on physical music experiences like LPs and helped bring back the turntable. A boom box that’s a purse takes that impulse and makes it wearable.
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E-Commerce
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