200 animals and a 95-year-old are found inside a suburban home
(NYT) — Armed with a tip and a warrant, detectives showed up at a house in Northport, New York, last week and found more than 200 animals living in squalor.
There were pets like cats, dogs, parrots and hamsters, and an exotic menagerie including hedgehogs, chinchillas and flying squirrels. Most of them were in cages strewed with waste, in a house infested with insects and so full of trash and debris that some areas were impassable, authorities said.
On the second floor, it got worse.
Police came upon a 95-year-old woman so hemmed in by clutter that she was essentially trapped inside her room, investigators said.
Police arrested Samantha Boyd, 57, a wildlife rehabilitator. District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney of Suffolk County called the case “a deeply distressing situation.”
Boyd was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty and endangering the welfare of a vulnerable elderly person, prosecutors said.
Boyd pleaded not guilty and is due back in court this month. Her partner, Neal Weschler, 61, was also charged with counts of misdemeanor animal cruelty.
Authorities removed the 95-year-old woman from the home, said Tania Lopez, a spokesperson for the district attorney. She declined to release other details for the sake of privacy.
John Di Leonardo, a wildlife rehabilitator who runs a rescue and advocacy nonprofit, Humane Long Island, said it was his complaint that got authorities to respond. He said he grew suspicious after seeing online postings by Boyd about rescued animals that she was not licensed to keep, like crows and mallard ducks. Upon stopping by the home, he said, “It smelled like a hoarder house.” He added, “There were red flags all over, lots of clutter and wildlife on the property.”
During the house search, Di Leonardo helped authorities remove the animals for placement with rescue groups.
These included ferrets, squirrels, ducks, chickens, geese, turkeys, hedgehogs, chipmunks, rabbits, crows, starlings, doves, guinea pigs, voles, flying squirrels, parakeets and tortoises.
Di Leonardo called the situation “a classic case of animal hoarding disorder.”
“Having more than 200 animals in a suburban home is ridiculous,” he said.
Nobel Prize in physics is awarded for work in quantum mechanics
(NYT) — John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday in Sweden for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.
“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,” Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for technologies such as the cellphone, cameras and fiber optic cables.
It also helped lay the groundwork for current attempts to build a quantum computer, a device that could compute and process information at speeds that would not be possible with classical computers.
The three laureates, all of whom are professors at American universities, will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor (around $1.17 million).