Goat fans, cities butting heads
Herd the latest? Miniature goats, 'tame' as dogs, blaze trails in U.S. neighborhoods
Looking for a pet that can live in your urban yard, answers to its name, wears a leash for strolls - and might produce milk you can drink or turn into cheese?
Meet the miniature goat.
That's the case goat fans are making to city officials across the USA. Hillsboro, Oregon., held three community meetings this year, including one last week, to ask residents whether goats and chickens should be added to a list of acceptable pets. City spokeswoman Barbara Simon says views run "more pro than con."
The Carbondale, Illinois, Planning Commission was debating this month whether to allow residents to keep chickens when Priscilla Pimentel, a member of the city's Sustainability Commission, added goats to the mix.
"If you can have a 250-pound dog in town, why not a miniature goat that can produce milk?" she says. "It's just common sense." The Planning Commission hasn't made a recommendation yet. Scientists hide gold with 3D "invisibility cloak"
German scientists have created a three-dimensional "invisibility cloak" that can hide objects by bending light waves.
The findings, published in the journal Science on Thursday, could in the future make it possible to make large objects invisible, but for now the researchers said they were not keen to speculate on possible applications.
"For now these...cloaking devices are just a beautiful and exciting benchmark to show what transformation optics can do," said Tolga Ergin of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
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