Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Depending on which hemisphere of the Earth you're currently reading this from, summer is finally starting to fight its way to the surface. For the more "green" of our readers, that can mean it's time to start making plans for summer gardening. But as anyone who's ever planted something edible can tell you, garden pests such as squirrels are fantastically effective at turning all your hard work into a wasteland. Finding ways to keep them away from your crops can be a full-time job, but luckily it's a job nobody will mind if automation steals from humans.
[Peter Quinn] writes in to tell us about the elaborate lengths he is going to keep bushy-tailed marauders away from his tomatoes this year. Long term he plans on setting up a non-lethal sentry gun to scare them away, but before he can get to that point he needs to perfect the science of automatically targeting his prey. At the same time, he wants to train the system well enough that it won't fire on humans or other animals such as cats and birds which might visit his garden.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/30/training-the-squirrel-terminator/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @08:38AM
Not denying the connection with cat faeces (though I would point out that contact with kitten faeces rather than that of adult cats increases your chances of getting infected), but ISTR the most common cause of Toxoplasmosis infections in the US is through contact with, and/or consumption of under-cooked meat, second most common cause of infections is from contaminated water supplies.