How The CIA Tried To Turn A Cat Into A Cyborg Spy

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PopSci – In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon transformed the furry feline into an elite spy, implanting a microphone in her ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull, and weaving a thin wire antenna into her long gray-and-white fur. This was Operation Acoustic Kitty, a top-secret plan to turn a cat into a living, walking surveillance machine. The leaders of the project hoped that by training the feline to go sit near foreign officials, they could eavesdrop on private conversations.

The problem was that cats are not especially trainable—they don’t have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master that dogs do—and the agency’s robo-cat didn’t seem terribly interested in national security. For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi. The program was abandoned; as a heavily redacted CIA memo from the time delicately phrased it, “Our final examination of trained cats… convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.” (Those specialized needs, one assumes, include a decidedly unflattened feline.)

Operation Acoustic Kitty, misadventure though it was, was a visionary idea just 50 years before its time. Today, once again, the U .S. government is looking to animal-machine hybrids to safeguard the country and its citizens. In 2006, for example, DARPA zeroed in on insects, asking the nation’s scientists to submit “innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs.”

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Nat Geo: Live Eagle Webcam

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Nat Geo – You’re looking at a live webcam featuring a bald eagle nest in Washington, D.C. The nest is home to a bald eagle pair and their chicks, which hatched in March 2013. You’ll see the adults bringing fish from the Anacostia River to feed their young. The two chicks are covered with black juvenile feathers—they won’t sport their characteristic white heads until they are four or five years old.

About the Eagles

The nest featured here is about five feet wide and made mostly of sticks. It sits about 80 feet up in a tree on the grounds of the Metropolitan Police Academy. Installing the webcam, provided by National Geographic, was Chief of Police Cathy L. Lanier’s idea. She has long been interested in the eagle pair that chose the academy grounds for its home. “It is fitting and exciting that our national bird has made a home on the Metropolitan Police Department’s Academy grounds,” said Lanier. “We look forward to viewing the eagles in their habitat.”

The eagles are thought to be the same pair that has nested in the area for several years, says Craig Koppie, raptor biologist at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake Bay field office in Annapolis, Maryland. Koppie is an advisor on the Earth Conservation Corps eagle restoration project, which also oversees a second bald eagle nest in Washington.

Bald eagle nests usually contain one to three dull-white eggs, and the parents take turns incubating them. Eggs hatch in about five weeks, and hatchlings are covered with soft, fluffy, light-gray feathers. “Generally the female stays on the nest while the father’s job is to bring in the food,” Koppie says. Food for this pair of eagles is generally fish—catfish, shad, or perch—plucked from the Anacostia.

Read More & Watch the Webcam!

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Texas Explosion Highlights Dangers of Anhydrous Ammonia

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Nat Geo – A fertilizer plant in the community of West, Texas that exploded on Wednesday to deadly effect was known to produce and store a volatile and potentially dangerous form of nitrogen-based fertilizer known as anhydrous ammonia. 
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Many fertilizer plants either produce or use anhydrous ammonia—a gas that is one part nitrogen and three parts hydrogen—as a base for creating different fertilizer types, said Kurt Steinke, a soil scientist at Michigan State University (MSU).
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“Anhydrous ammonia can be combined with different compounds, such as nitric acid, sulfuric acid, or even carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce the different kinds of fertilizers that we use today,” he said.
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Anhydrous ammonia—often referred to as simply ammonia—can be cheaply manufactured and is an effective fertilizer in its own right. But producing it requires intense heat and it must be stored at high pressures.
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“When used in agriculture anhydrous ammonia is compressed into a liquid and must be stored under high pressure in specially designed tanks.  When the air temperature around the tank increases the temperature of the liquid inside the tank increases causing the liquid to expand thus increasing the internal tank pressure,” Steinke said. “If you have a leak in the ammonia tank … the liquid can quickly convert to a gas rapidly combining with body moisture to cause severe dehydration and chemical burns.”
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