The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a new optical time-domain survey that uses the Palomar 48 inch Schmidt telescope. A custom-built wide-field camera provides a 47 deg^2 field of view and 8 s readout time, yielding more than an order of magnitude improvement in survey speed relative to its predecessor survey, the Palomar Transient Factory. We describe the design and implementation of the camera and observing system. The ZTF data system at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center provides near-real-time reduction to identify moving and varying objects. We outline the analysis pipelines, data products, and associated archive. Finally, we present on-sky performance analysis and first scientific results from commissioning and the early survey. ZTF's public alert stream will serve as a useful precursor for that of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Education for animal welfare

There are many ways by which animal welfare can be improved and animal suffering reduced, such as by means of legislative enactment, scientific research, or better stockmanship. Education has an important role to play in each component of this package of means, and in this book, education is regarded in the broad sense of creating awareness and facilitating change. In relation to each component of the package, education can contribute to enhancing the welfare of individual animals, which is important, as well as result in better animal welfare generally. The book comprises two separate, but inter-related, components. First, a number of specific themes in relation to which education can play an important role in reducing animal suffering are considered, and subsequently a number of different though often interrelated contexts in which the educational themes can be addressed to reduce animal suffering are examined. [Extract from Introduction