chickens

When I was a kid, the only animal I wanted for a pet was a dinosaur. Seeing as non-avian dinosaurs had been extinct for around 65 million years, I settled for an iguana. However, new research at McGill University in Canada may finally bring me that pet dino I've been waiting 20 years for.

To create this image, which won the popular vote in the 2008 Nikon Small World contest, 22-year-old Tomás Pais de Azevedo, a graduate student in evolutionary and developmental biology at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, removed an eight-day-old, two-inch-long chicken embryo from its egg and stained it with a dye that binds to cartilage. The process took three days, after which he photographed the embryo through a stereo microscope. The dark-blue areas of the chick indicate where the cartilage will ultimately solidify into bone.

One of the dire consequences of factory farming is that it encourages the spread of disease due to the close quarters in which the animals live. Thats why theyre fed antibiotics and other medicines when they arent sick. This overuse of antibiotics, while beneficial to the flocks and herds in the short term, leads to stronger and more drug-resistant bacteria in the long term. The effect has been widely reported by popular authors like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser. What we havent heard much about are how viruses can thrive in this environment.