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superbfurbz · 6 years ago

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Hey, sorry to ask but, I want to 'like'/own a furby, can't cant because of past experiences. (spooky stories as a child, intense spooking from family members) And i know it's all fake, but theres always 1 part of my mind thats like "but what if it is" And i really want to stop that. any tips?

hey it’s okay! if ur gonna get advice anywhere it makes complete sense to talk to ppl in the furby fandom. i’m sorry your family went so hard on convincing you furbys were scary. since i was a kid i’ve had really strong feelings about adults or older kids that do this to little ones, and i think it’s very mean and unfair. you and so many others share this experience, so it’s clear what you say to young people matters and you’re setting them up for unnecessary stress by giving them irrational fears. i hope one day you will finally feel at ease around furbs, but until then it is totally okay to take your time and work through your own process.i don’t have much, but i have two approaches. i hope one of them (or even a combination) might help you over time.

1.) The Realistic Approach: This is all about continuing what you’ve already been doing. Sometimes ppl have this idea that one can “snap out of” an intense fear or a phobia, but that is by and large untrue. Fear is complicated, and rooted deep. Ppl can be deathly terrified of something and not even have an explanation why, making it harder to identify the root and cope with the fear. In your case, you have the advantage of knowing exactly why you have these feelings about furbys, and in addition, you know it’s not your fault or own doing. Remind yourself that your family members were having “fun” at your own expense. They don’t deserve the satisfaction of your fear. What you deserve is to be able to like things and experience things on your own accord. Furbys are toys, and they are electronic ones. All of their glitches and quirks can easily (and most have!) been explained away. I’m not sure what your family told you specifically to instill this fear in you, but one of the most common complaints I’ve come across is the “they come alive in the middle of the night with no batteries” thing. It makes sense that this would startle ppl, esp small kids. But instead of stoking the scary fires, these kids should have been given an explanation and a small robotics lesson. If anything these are missed opportunities to encourage a child who could take a strong interest in tech and design and dumping an irrational fear on them. Electronics in general can store small bits of energy, and through either a trigger such as sudden movement or the passage of enough time can allow for that stored energy to travel through the electronic and “turn it on” for a brief moment. If you ever work your way up to getting a furby and in the rare event that this occurs, try to remind yourself of that. The same goes for more common glitches like funky garbled audio- the furb has sustained damage or wasn’t put together properly.

2.) The Fantastical Approach: This is all about using your imagination to free you from the constraints of your fear. There are far more possibilities than what I’ll be mentioning here, so please feel free to come up with your own tactics if none of these jive for ya. Personally, as a child, my family did very extreme and mean things to scare me. One of these things was the classic ~there’s somehow a monster that’s terrifying and cruel but it will only come for children ooo~ (if this doesn’t sound too bad, know that i am omitting a lot of very gross and borderline abusive details bc this blog is meant to be a safer space). However… it didn’t really work on me. I would hope and wish and pray for a monster to take me away. I felt that a monster would understand me far more than my own family. Or, how cool would it be to have a friend that only you can see? The way I rationalized it, monsters are incredibly powerful- they can do almost anything they want (except walk around in the sunshine i guess lol). So a monster is a magical, mythical thing. If a monster approaches you, it means you’re special and interesting. This magical creature that generally holds humans in disdain- or at least, at a distance- wants to get to know and befriend you! The way I saw it as a kid and still do, is, how is the boogeyman that much different from a unicorn. And because of my experiences and inclinations, the answer for me is that they’re not different at all. Magic is magic, it just comes in different flavors. How could you spin this for yourself personally? Well, maybe furbys never “chose” your relatives. Perhaps they had some around the house, but how well did they treat their furbs? You might have been a tender child, an “easy target”. You might have been a caring, considerate, meticulous child. If these qualities were/are true of you, furbys would take very kindly to you. In fact, I know any furby in the world would be so proud of you for wanting to work through this, and I know they would understand the fear isn’t your fault. I bet a furby would choose you, because you seem like a sweet and patient and thoughtful person. Maybe your family was jealous, their furbys would turn on as they are meant to do but no special connection could be formed. If you were to have been able to get close to a furby, your relationship may have been very special. In a way, you could think of working through this as getting back to something you’ve always deserved, even if it is just a bit of fun and comfort!

At the end of the day, if this is something you can’t shake, that’s okay. It’s okay to be afraid of things, and as eager to jump to chastising as some ppl can be about this, it is okay to have irrational fears. Irrational doesn’t mean invalid, because having ppl pound an idea into your head when you are very young is plunging that fear into a mind at its most open state, when you are learning so much about existing in the world, right and wrong, caution and risk, payoff and reward. Your fear of furbys won’t get in your way in general, and you can obviously have a completely happy life without ever ridding yourself of this fear. I can only hope this offers you something, at the very least I hope I gave you a safe and wide space to air out your feelings. Thank you for trusting us with this, and I’m genuinely so proud of you for trying to work through it all!

If you do attain your goal, however, know that there is a furby out there who can’t wait to finally meet you. They’ve been so patient, rooting you on from wherever they are, believing in you and knowing you’re a worthwhile person to know and love.

your pal, Bug

#ask #furby #long post #text

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mthrynn · 7 years ago

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Thus week’s SC17 keynote – Life, the Universe and Computing: The Story of the SKA Telescope – was a powerful pitch for the potential of Big Science projects that also showcased the foundational role of high performance computing in modern science. It was also visually stunning as images of stars and galaxies and tiny telescopes and giant telescopes streamed across the high definition screen extended the length of Colorado Convention Center ballroom’s stage. One was reminded of astronomer Carl Sagan narrating the Cosmos TV series.

SKA, you may know, is the Square Kilometre Array project being run by an international consortium and intended to build the largest radio telescope in the world; it be 50 times more powerful than any other radio telescope today. The largest today is ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) located in Chile and has 66 dishes.

SKA will be sited in two locations, South Africa, and Australia. The two keynoters Philip Diamond, Director General of SKA, and Rosie Bolton, SKA Regional Centre Project Scientist and Project Scientist for the international engineering consortium designing the high performance computers, took turns outlining radio astronomy history and SKA ambition to build on that. Theirs was a swiftly-moving talk, both entertaining and informative. The visuals flashing adding to the impact.

Their core message: This massive new telescope (I guess you could say two telescopes) will open a new window on astrophysical phenomena and create a mountain of data for scientists to work on for years. SKA, say Diamond and Bolton, will help clarify the early evolution of the universe, be able to detect gravitational waves by their effect on pulsars, shed light on dark matter, produce insight around cosmic magnetism, create detailed, accurate 3D maps of galaxies, and much more. It could even play a SETI like role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“When fully deployed, SKA will be able to detect TV signals, if they exist, from the nearest tens maybe 100 stars and will be able to detect the airport radars across the entire galaxy,” said Diamond, in response to a question. SKA is creating a new government organization to run the observatory, “something like CERN or the European Space Agency, and [we] are now very close to having this process finalized,” said Diamond.

Indeed this is exciting stuff. It is also incredibly computationally intensive. Think about an army of dish arrays and antennas, capturing signals 24×7, moving them over high speed networks to one of two digital “signal processing facilities”, one for each location, and then on to two ‘science data processors” centers (think big computers). And let’s not forget data must be made available to scientists around the world.

Consider just a few data points, shown below, that were flashed across stage during the keynote presentation. The context will become clearer later.

It’s a grand vision and there’s still a long way to go. SKA, like all Big Science projects, won’t happen overnight. SKA was first conceived in 90s at the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) which established the Large Telescope Working Group to begin a worldwide effort to develop the scientific goals and technical specifications for a next generation radio observatory. The idea arose to create a “hydrogen array” able to detect H radiofrequency emission (~1420 MHz). A square kilometer was required to have a large enough collection area to see back into the early universe. In 2011 those efforts consolidated in a not-for-project company that now has ten member countries (link to brief history of SKA). The U.S. which did participate in early SKA efforts chose not to join the consortium at the time.

Although first conceived as a hydrogen array, Diamond emphasized, “With a telescope of that size you can study many things. Even in its early stages SKA will be able to map galaxies early in the universe evolution. When full deployed it will conduct fullest galaxy mapping in 3D encompassing up to one million individual galaxies and cover 12.5 billon years of cosmic history.”

A two-phase deployment is planned. “We’re heading full steam towards critical design reviews next year,” said Diamond. Full construction starts in two years with construction of the first phase expected to begin in 2019. So far €200 have been committed for design along with “a large fraction” of the €640 required for first phase construction. Clearly there are technology and funding hurdles ahead. Diamond quipped if the U.S. were to join SKA and pony up, say $2 billion, they would ‘fix’ the spelling of kilometre to kilometer.

There will actually be two telescopes, one in South Africa about 600 km north of Cape Town and another one roughly 800 km north of Perth in western Australia. They are being located in remote regions to reduce radiofrequency interference from human activities.

“In South Africa we are going to be building close to 200 dishes, 15 meters in diameter, and the dishes will be spread over 150 km. They [will operate] over a frequency range of 350 MHz to 14 GHz. In Australia we will build 512 clusters, each of 256 antennas. That means a total of over 130,000 2-meter tall antennas, spread over 65 km. these low frequency antennas will be tapered with periodic dipoles and will cover the frequency range 50 to 350MHz. It is this array that will be the time machine that observes hydrogen all the way back to the dawn of the universe.”

Pretty cool stuff. Converting those signals is a mammoth task. SKA plans two different types of processing center for each location. “The radio waves induce voltages in the receivers that capture them and modern technology allows us to digitize them to high precision than ever before. From there optical fibers transmit the digital data from the telescopes to what we call central processing facilities or (CPFs). There’s one for each telescope,” said Bolton.

Using a variety of technologies including “some exciting FPGA, CPU-GU, and hybrids”, CPFs are where the signals are combined. Great care must be taken to first synchronize the data so it enters the processing chain exactly when it should to account for the fact the radio waves from space reached one antenna before reaching another. “We need to correct that phase offset down to the nanosecond,” said Bolton.

Once that’s done a Fourier transform is applied to the data. “It decomposes essentially a function of time into the frequencies that make it up; it moves us into the frequency domain. We do this with such precision that the SKA will be able to process 65000 different radio frequencies simultaneously,” said Diamond

Once the signals have been separated in frequencies they processed one of two ways. “We can either stack the signals together of various antenna in what we call a time domain data. Each stacking operation corresponds to a different direction in the sky. We’ll be able to look at 2000 such directions simultaneously. This time domain processing analysis detects repeating objects such as pulsars or one off events like gamma ray explosions. If we do find an event, we are planning to store the raw voltage signals at the antennae for a few minutes so we can go back in time and investigate them to see what happened,” said Bolton.

This time domain data can be used by researchers to measure pulsar – which are a bit like cosmic lighthouses – signal arrival times accurately and detect the drift if there is one as a gravitational wave passes through.

“We can also use these radio signals to make images of the sky. To do that we take the signals from each pair if antennas, each baseline, and effectively multiply them together generating data objects we call visibilities. Imagine it will be done for 200 dishes and 512 groups of antennas, that’s 150,000 baselines ad 65000 different frequencies. That makes up to 10B different data streams. Doing this is a data intensive process that requires around 50 petaflops of dedicated digital signal processing.

Signals are processed inside these central processing facilities in a way that depends on the science that “we want to do with them. Once processed the data are then sent via more fiber optic cables to the Science Data Processors or SDPs. Two of these “great supercomputers” are planned, one in Cape Town for the dish array and one in Perth for low frequency antennas.

“We have two flavors of data within the science processor. In the time domain we’ll do panning for astrophysical gold, searching over 1.5M candidate objects every ten minutes sniffing out the real astrophysical phenomena such as pulsar signals or flashes of radio light,” said Diamond. The expectation is for a 10,000 to 1 negative-to-positive events. Machine learning will play a key role in finding the “gold”.

Making sense of the 10 billion incoming visibility data streams poses the greatest computational burden, emphasized Bolton: “This is really hard because inside the visibilities (data objects) of the sky and antenna responses are all jumbled. We need to do another massive Fourier transform to get from the visibility space that depends on the antenna separations to sky planes. Ultimately we need to develop self-consistent models not only of the sky that generated the signals but also how each antenna was behaving and even how the atmosphere was changing during the data gathering.

“We can’t do that in one fell swoop. Instead we’ll have several iterations trying to find the calibration parameters and source positions of brightnesses.” With each iteration bit by bit, fainter and fainter signal emerge from the noise. “Every time we do another iteration we apply different calibration techniques and we improve a lot of them but we can’t be sure when this process is going to converge so it is going to be difficult,” said Bolton.

A typical SKA map, she said, will probably contain hundreds of thousands of radio array sources. The incoming images are about 10 petabytes in size. Output 3D images are 5000 pixels on each axis and 1 petabyte in size.

Distributing this data to scientists for analysis is another huge challenge. The plan is to distribute data via fiber to SKA regional centers. “This another real game changer that the SKA, CERN, and a few other facilities are bringing about. Scientists will use the computing power of the SKA regional centers to analyze these data products,” said Diamond.

The keynote was a wowing, multimedia presentation, and warmly received by attendees. It bears repeating that many issues remain and schedules have slipped slightly, but it is still a stellar example of Big Science, requiring massively coordinated international efforts, and underpinned with enormous computing resources. Such collaboration is well aligned with SC17’s theme – HPC Connects.

Link to video recording of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2522&v=VceKNiRxDBc

The post SC17 Keynote – HPC Powers SKA Efforts to Peer Deep into the Cosmos appeared first on HPCwire.

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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Read this and you may never eat chicken again

Most meat animals are raised with the assistance of daily doses of antibiotics. By 2050, antibiotic resistance will cause a staggering 10 million deaths a year

Every year I spend some time in a tiny apartment in Paris, seven stories above the mayors offices for the 11th arrondissement. The Place de la Bastille the spot where the French revolution sparked political change that transformed the world is a 10-minute walk down a narrow street that threads between student nightclubs and Chinese fabric wholesalers.

Twice a week, hundreds of Parisians crowd down it, heading to the march de la Bastille, stretched out along the center island of the Boulevard Richard Lenoir.

Blocks before you reach the market, you can hear it: a low hum of argument and chatter, punctuated by dollies thumping over the curbstones and vendors shouting deals. But even before you hear it, you can smell it: the funk of bruised cabbage leaves underfoot, the sharp sweetness of fruit sliced open for samples, the iodine tang of seaweed propping up rafts of scallops in broad rose-colored shells.

Threaded through them is one aroma that I wait for. Burnished and herbal, salty and slightly burned, it has so much heft that it feels physical, like an arm slid around your shoulders to urge you to move a little faster. It leads to a tented booth in the middle of the market and a line of customers that wraps around the tent poles and trails down the market alley, tangling with the crowd in front of the flower seller.

In the middle of the booth is a closet-size metal cabinet, propped up on iron wheels and bricks. Inside the cabinet, flattened chickens are speared on rotisserie bars that have been turning since before dawn. Every few minutes, one of the workers detaches a bar, slides off its dripping bronze contents, slips the chickens into flat foil-lined bags, and hands them to the customers who have persisted to the head of the line.

I can barely wait to get my chicken home.

Chickens roam in an outdoor enclosure of a chicken farm in Vielle-Soubiran, south-western France. Photograph: Iroz Gaizka/AFP/Getty Images

The skin of a poulet crapaudine named because its spatchcocked outline resembles a crapaud, a toad shatters like mica; the flesh underneath, basted for hours by the birds dripping on to it from above, is pillowy but springy, imbued to the bone with pepper and thyme.

The first time I ate it, I was stunned into happy silence, too intoxicated by the experience to process why it felt so new. The second time, I was delighted again and then, afterward, sulky and sad.

I had eaten chicken all my life: in my grandmothers kitchen in Brooklyn, in my parents house in Houston, in a college dining hall, friends apartments, restaurants and fast food places, trendy bars in cities and old-school joints on back roads in the south. I thought I roasted a chicken pretty well myself. But none of them were ever like this, mineral and lush and direct.

I thought of the chickens Id grown up eating. They tasted like whatever the cook added to them: canned soup in my grandmothers fricassee, her party dish; soy sauce and sesame in the stir fries my college housemate brought from her aunts restaurant; lemon juice when my mother worried about my fathers blood pressure and banned salt from the house.

This French chicken tasted like muscle and blood and exercise and the outdoors. It tasted like something that it was too easy to pretend it was not: like an animal, like a living thing. We have made it easy not to think about what chickens were before we find them on our plates or pluck them from supermarket cold cases.

I live, most of the time, less than an hours drive from Gainesville, Georgia, the self-described poultry capital of the world, where the modern chicken industry was born. Georgia raises 1.4bn broilers a year, making it the single biggest contributor to the almost 9bn birds raised each year in the United States; if it were an independent country, it would rank in chicken production somewhere near China and Brazil.

Yet you could drive around for hours without ever knowing you were in the heart of chicken country unless you happened to get behind a truck heaped with crates of birds on their way from the remote solid-walled barns they are raised in to the gated slaughter plants where they are turned into meat. That first French market chicken opened my eyes to how invisible chickens had been for me, and after that, my job began to show me what that invisibility had masked.

My house is less than two miles from the front gate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that sends disease detectives racing to outbreaks all over the world. For more than a decade, one of my obsessions as a journalist has been following them on their investigations and in long late-night conversations in the United States and Asia and Africa, with physicians and veterinarians and epidemiologists, I learned that the chickens that had surprised me and the epidemics that fascinated me were more closely linked than I had ever realized.

I discovered that the reason American chicken tastes so different from those I ate everywhere else was that in the United States, we breed for everything but flavor: for abundance, for consistency, for speed. Many things made that transformation possible.

But as I came to understand, the single biggest influence was that, consistently over decades, we have been feeding chickens, and almost every other meat animal, routine doses of antibiotics on almost every day of their lives.

Caged battery hens in a chicken farm in Catania, Sicily. Photograph: Fabrizio Villa/AFP/Getty Images

Antibiotics do not create blandness, but they created the conditions that allowed chicken to be bland, allowing us to turn a skittish, active backyard bird into a fast-growing, slow-moving, docile block of protein, as muscle-bound and top-heavy as a bodybuilder in a kids cartoon. At this moment, most meat animals, across most of the planet, are raised with the assistance of doses of antibiotics on most days of their lives: 63,151 tons of antibiotics per year, about 126m pounds.

Farmers began using the drugs because antibiotics allowed animals to convert feed to tasty muscle more efficiently; when that result made it irresistible to pack more livestock into barns, antibiotics protected animals against the likelihood of disease. Those discoveries, which began with chickens, created what we choose to call industrialized agriculture, a poultry historian living in Georgia proudly wrote in 1971.

Chicken prices fell so low that it became the meat that Americans eat more than any other and the meat most likely to transmit food-borne illness, and also antibiotic resistance, the greatest slow-brewing health crisis of our time.

For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden epidemic unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected.

Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support and few patients organizations advocating for them. If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in daycare, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym.

And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse.

They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses 2m annually just in the United States and cost billions in healthcare spending, lost wages and lost national productivity.

It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100tn and will cause a staggering 10m deaths per year.

Disease organisms have been developing defenses against the antibiotics meant to kill them for as long as antibiotics have existed. Penicillin arrived in the 1940s, and resistance to it swept the world in the 1950s.

Tetracycline arrived in 1948, and resistance was nibbling at its effectiveness before the 1950s ended. Erythromycin was discovered in 1952, and erythromycin resistance arrived in 1955. Methicillin, a lab-synthesized relative of penicillin, was developed in 1960 specifically to counter penicillin resistance, yet within a year, staph bacteria developed defenses against it as well, earning the bug the name MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

After MRSA, there were the ESBLs, extended-spectrum beta-lactamases, which defeated not only penicillin and its relatives but also a large family of antibiotics called cephalosporins. And after cephalosporins were undermined, new antibiotics were achieved and lost in turn.

Each time pharmaceutical chemistry produced a new class of antibiotics, with a new molecular shape and a new mode of action, bacteria adapted. In fact, as the decades passed, they seemed to adapt faster than before. Their persistence threatened to inaugurate a post-antibiotic era, in which surgery could be too dangerous to attempt and ordinary health problems scrapes, tooth extractions, broken limbs could pose a deadly risk.

For a long time, it was assumed that the extraordinary unspooling of antibiotic resistance around the world was due only to misuse of the drugs in medicine: to parents begging for the drugs even though their children had viral illnesses that antibiotics could not help; physicians prescribing antibiotics without checking to see whether the drug they chose was a good match; people stopping their prescriptions halfway through the prescribed course because they felt better, or saving some pills for friends without health insurance, or buying antibiotics over the counter, in the many countries where they are available that way and dosing themselves.

But from the earliest days of the antibiotic era, the drugs have had another, parallel use: in animals that are grown to become food.

Eighty percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States and more than half of those sold around the world are used in animals, not in humans. Animals destined to be meat routinely receive antibiotics in their feed and water, and most of those drugs are not given to treat diseases, which is how we use them in people.

Instead, antibiotics are given to make food animals put on weight more quickly than they would otherwise, or to protect food animals from illnesses that the crowded conditions of livestock production make them vulnerable to. And nearly two-thirds of the antibiotics that are used for those purposes are compounds that are also used against human illness which means that when resistance against the farm use of those drugs arises, it undermines the drugs usefulness in human medicine as well.

Caged chickens in San Diego, California. California voters passed a new animal welfare law in 2008 to require that the states egg-laying hens be given room to move. Photograph: Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

Resistance is a defensive adaptation, an evolutionary strategy that allows bacteria to protect themselves against antibiotics power to kill them. It is created by subtle genetic changes that allow organisms to counter antibiotics attacks on them, altering their cell walls to keep drug molecules from attaching or penetrating, or forming tiny pumps that eject the drugs after they have entered the cell.

What slows the emergence of resistance is using an antibiotic conservatively: at the right dose, for the right length of time, for an organism that will be vulnerable to the drug, and not for any other reason. Most antibiotic use in agriculture violates those rules.

Resistant bacteria are the result.

Antibiotic resistance is like climate change: it is an overwhelming threat, created over decades by millions of individual decisions and reinforced by the actions of industries.

It is also like climate change in that the industrialized west and the emerging economies of the global south are at odds. One quadrant of the globe already enjoyed the cheap protein of factory farming and now regrets it; the other would like not to forgo its chance. And it is additionally like climate change because any action taken in hopes of ameliorating the problem feels inadequate, like buying a fluorescent lightbulb while watching a polar bear drown.

But that it seems difficult does not mean it is not possible. The willingness to relinquish antibiotics of farmers in the Netherlands, as well as Perdue Farms and other companies in the United States, proves that industrial-scale production can be achieved without growth promoters or preventive antibiotic use. The stability of Masadour and Lou and White Oak Pastures shows that medium-sized and small farms can secure a place in a remixed meat economy.

Whole Foods pivot to slower-growing chicken birds that share some of the genetics preserved by Frank Reese illustrates that removing antibiotics and choosing birds that do not need them returns biodiversity to poultry production. All of those achievements are signposts, pointing to where chicken, and cattle and hogs and farmed fish after them, need to go: to a mode of production where antibiotics are used as infrequently as possible to care for sick animals, but not to fatten or protect them.

That is the way antibiotics are now used in human medicine, and it is the only way that the utility of antibiotics and the risk of resistance can be adequately balanced.

Excerpted from Big Chicken by Maryn McKenna published by National Geographic on 12 September 2017. Available wherever books are sold.

Plucked! The Truth About Chicken by Maryn McKenna is published in the UK by Little, Brown and is now available in eBook @14.99, and is published in Trade Format @14.99 on 1 February 2018.