This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Early one winter morning in 2020, Kurt VerCauteren discovered a cluster of dead birds in a barren field in northwest Texas. They were small birds, mostly dark-eyed juncos, but also a smattering of white-crowned sparrows. VerCauteren's team had poisoned them, inadvertently. The clues were clear, the death uncomplicated: The birds had flown in before dawn to scavenge deadly morsels of a contaminated peanut paste, left behind after a sounder of wild hogs had torn through the area in a feeding frenzy. The birds likely died within minutes of eating. "I couldn't even see the crumbs," says VerCauteren, a wildlife biologist at the US Department of Agriculture in Fort Collins, Colorado, who has spent years developing and testing pig poisons. The birds were the unintended victims of a field experiment to test a toxicant--one intended for feral pigs, but no other animals--that had been developed in Australia.

The extensive use of private and personally identifiable information in modern statistical (and machine learning) applications can present an obstacle to individuals contributing their data to research. As just one example, when considering contribution to biobanks Kaufman et al. (2009) reported 90% of respondents had privacy concerns. Addressing these concerns is paramount if the participation rate in biomedical and genetic research is to be increased, especially for government and industry where public trust is lower (Kaufman et al., 2009). Indeed, industry is on the brink on embarking on biomedical applications on a scale never before witnessed via the impending wave of so-called'wearable devices' such as smart watches, which present serious privacy concerns. Companies hope to market the ability to monitor and track vital health signs round the clock, perhaps fitting classification models to alert different health concerns of interest.