Moseby said that while the effort is a good first try, many cats fail to find the sausages or other poison bait before the deadly treats break down and are no longer toxic. Cats eat only when they’re hungry and are typically attracted to a prey animal based on its movement. Also, other animals sometimes find the bait first, such as the western quoll (a small nocturnal marsupial).
To improve cat management efforts, Moseby’s colleague and husband John Read helped to create a grooming trap that squirts out poisonous paste onto the fur of cats when activated by motion. Since cats are compulsory groomers, they will immediately lick themselves to clean off the sticky goo.
In one study, published in the International Journal of Pest Management last year, researchers tested a proof-of-concept grooming trap. A cat that triggers the trap is squirted with a gel containing para-aminopropiophenone (also known as PAPP) – a toxin that targets the haemoglobin in red blood cells that carries oxygen to the heart muscles and brain.
In the test, 14 of 16 feral cats tracked by the researchers in the wild showed symptoms of low oxygen supply. Eight of the cats were dead by the following morning without exhibiting signs of distress. The trap has a range of more than 13 feet.
Another method of cat control is to target specific, prolific hunters in the feral cat community. Moseby and Read, along with colleagues, created a predator profile and analyzed individual cats. They concluded that large male cats were often the killers of native quolls– while smaller cats, which tend to be females or low-ranking males, generally eat birds and snakes. The researchers are working on a kind of fatal Trojan horse by injecting capsules under quolls' skin. The capsules would remain stable under the skin but break down in the gut of cat when ingested, explained Moseby. “Cats do not chew their food thoroughly and consume almost all of the prey they eat, so the capsule is likely to be ingested during prey consumption,” she said.
The method may prove most useful when animals – like the quoll – are being reintroduced into their former range. It should prevent repeat offenders, said Moseby.
In urban environments, U.S. city officials are taking a more gentle approach to managing feral cat populations. Kathleen O’Malley, a cat caretaker with the NYC Feral Cat Initiative says that TNR – also known as trap, neuter, return – is a much better way of reducing feral cat numbers over time. These programs are more labor-intensive and expensive, as the cats have to be carefully trapped and surgically sterilized.
Chemicals can be injected to reduce a male cat’s abilities to breed, such as Zeuterin, but O’Malley warned that they don’t reduce the behaviors people dislike in stray cats. “TNR stops the behaviors associated with mating, like spraying to mark territory with hormones that make urine offensively smelly,” she said. “It also curtails their roaming behavior because they’re not going out looking for mates, so the cats have smaller territory.”
O’Malley mentioned that some research shows that reducing cat populations in Australia actually boosts the populations of another invasive species, rats. Efforts directed at cats also ignore other, potentially larger threats to Australia’s wildlife, such as the non-native fox. Finally, she said, the citizens may not have the guts for a long war with felines. “My view on the Australian policy is it’s not going to work unless they are dedicated to years of bloodshed -- and the public is going to lose their stomach for it.”
Moseby pointed out that most feral cats in Australia live independently of humans, so neutering semi-wild cats will not make a huge difference to the wild population – it wouldn’t be feasible to neuter enough cats to make a dent in their damaging activities. Neutering also leaves cats in the environment to kill native wildlife.
"In Italy, opera is a blood sport," Prodi said.
For a century and a half, almost every opera house in the world followed the Italian model, including the Royal Opera House in London, rebuilt for the third time in 1857, and Vienna's State Opera, built in 1869 and rebuilt in its original design after World War II, said Protano-Biggs. They remain that way but acoustics are better in both thanks to later tinkering. The designs of the boxes were different, Protano-Biggs said. In the new model, the boxes have a different, "in-line" architecture so the surface is more regular.
The rest of the world eventually moved on, starting in the 19th century. Most modern houses eliminated the boxes altogether. They are also constructed of more sound-absorbing materials. Economics and sociology have modernized the experience in Italy, which has 800 classic opera houses today. But the acoustical profiles remain.
La Scala in Milan — perhaps the most famous opera house of them all — was badly damaged in World War II with only the outer walls standing. The rest of the theater was reconstructed in "a preservationist fashion," said Protano-Biggs. La Fenice, or The Phoenix, in Venice got its name from being burned down in 1836 and rebuilt in the classic design Italians love. It was destroyed and reconstructed again in 1996.
Melanoma is responsible for three-quarters of all deaths from skin cancer, so new methods of diagnosing it early can be cause for excitement. "This is the first one looking at blood perfusion for the tumors," said Hooman Khorasani, chief of the division of Mohs, Reconstructive and Cosmetic surgery at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
However, Khorasani, who was not involved in the study, said the method will need improvement to be acceptable to dermatologists. That's because the procedure currently takes half an hour, throughout which a patient's blood must be monitored by an attendant.
"It would ruin your practice to have a patient in the room for that time," Khorasani said. "You wouldn't be able to pay your rent."
Because the laser Doppler technique does not need a biopsy to differentiate between moles caused by malignant melanoma and non-cancerous ones, the new technique could reduce the number of surgical procedures performed.
"The current diagnostic tools of examination by doctors followed by biopsy inevitably lead to unnecessary invasive excisions," said Marco Rossi of Pisa University in Italy, who planned and managed the study, in a statement.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently gave provisional approval to another noninvasive method, called MelaFind. MelaFind works in the same way as pathologists who analyze biopsies, diagnosing the disease through visual cues. But it focuses on the mole on the skin rather than on a sample excised from it.
"It sends an image to a central database that gives you a probability" that it is melanoma, Khorasani said. "But it has a hard time differentiating among lesions."
To develop an alternative method, Rossi's group started with 54 volunteers who had unusual-looking moles that were possibly associated with melanoma.