Animal rescuer and cinematographer Douglas Thorn’s passion for animals began when he was a little kid. “I started rescuing orphaned baby animals,” Thorn says. “And I wanted to be a wildlife cinematographer.”

When Thron grew up, he did just that, working for shows like Discovery Channels Shark Week, filming the great white sharks off the coast of Santa Cruz, California. But Thron says it was the Paradise Fire in California in 2018 that “pushed” him to do animal rescue activism work, putting his aerial cinematography skills to good use.

At the time, Thron was filming a man who was rescuing cats after the fire using an infrared hand-held camera. The camera uses heat to detect the animals at night Thron and the man talked about how incredible it would be to put one on a drone to detect animals more easily. “The animal's body temperature will glow on the screen and you can pick them out among the bricks and stones,” explains Thron.

The first animal Thron ever rescued was a dog in the Bahamas after a category-5 hurricane hit, which wiped out hundreds of houses. Thron tested out putting an infrared scope on a drone and found the dog.

“The drone really shaves off critical time so that the really badly hurt animals are able to be rescued,” Thron says. Once the scope picks up the “heat signature of an animal”, Thron turns a spotlight on the animal and zooms in on it, so he and the rescue crews can go and save the animal.

Thron has basically been “going non-stop since then”. His TV show, Doug to the Rescue, shows some of his heart-warming animal rescues, including after Hurricane Laura in Louisiana in 2020 and after fires in Northern California and Oregon. Thron also helped rescue koalas after fires damaged parts of Australia in 2020.

To fight against the ballooning waistlines among people, several U. S. cities have instituted taxes on drinks with added sugar aiming to reduce consumption, but new research suggests these policies currently have one fundamental flaw.

The study found sugary drink only reduce purchasing if price tags at stores mention consumers are paying that tax when they buy the drink.

The research included a field study at two convenience stores in San Francisco, which currently has a tax on sugary drinks of 1 cent per ounce. Researchers varied the price tags placed on the sugary drinks over the eight-week study: one tag that simply said the price for the 12-ounce drink ($1.52) and one that had the price and the message “Includes SF Sugary Drink Tax”. All non-sugary drinks, which weren’t subject to the tax, simply had the price of the drink ($1.40).

The researchers compared sales of the drinks during the study period to the two weeks before the study began when the sugary drink tax was in effect but there were no price tags on any drinks. Results showed sales of sugary drinks weren't lower during the two weeks, compared to sales before the tax, indicating the tax itself didn't reduce purchases of sugary drinks.

The researchers then looked at the effects of the two different price tags. Results showed the share of sugary drinks purchased when the tags simply showed the price wasn’t significantly different from the two-week period before the study, but did decline slightly when the tags mentioned the price included the added tax.

In a separate online study, the researchers asked participants to estimate what the tax would be on a can of their favorite drink that cost $1.52. The average estimate was 40 cents — much higher than the 12 cents actually demanded in San Francisco. When told the tax was only 12 cents, they reported they’d still purchase the drink.

The findings suggest price tags should mention the tax but not the amount, for consumers tend to overestimate how much the tax is. “If cities want these policies to be effective, they need to regulate how sugary drinks are labeled at stores and they currently don’t do that,” said Donnelly, lead author of the study.