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“His story haunted me, it was so sad, and a few months after he was rescued, my mother was looking to adopt a dog,” Anne Grasso, one of Spyder’s new family members, told The Dodo. “He was a little larger than she was looking for at 38 pounds, but he was so sweet even after everything he has been through. I actually sent my mom some of his pictures from the rescue group and then I came across his story on The Dodo, and when she read it and all he had been through, she just said to me, ‘He’s the one.’”

Brown called Petersburg Animal Care & Control right away, and Chief Debbie Broughton got in touch with a local mechanic shop, Leete Tire & Auto, to help.

“We told her to come on in and our service manager would assist,” Lea Tatum Rowsey, vice president of Leete, told The Dodo. “Once [they] arrived, our service manager, Warren Strum, jumped to the rescue and started removing the fender liner. The kitten, which you could only barely see through a small hole in the open driver side door, was meowing and clearly in distress.”

While it’s unclear how long the kitten had been trapped there, it’s likely she was there all day, given how stressed she had become. She had had a very long morning, but was finally almost safe.

“The two pangolins are doing quite well now,” a representative from SVW told The Dodo. “They are eating all of the ant eggs we provide them.”

Luckily, the animals are recovering well so far. But their situation is all too common for their species, which is the most trafficked animal in the world.

Native to Africa and Asia, pangolins are especially sought-after because their meat is considered a delicacy, and their scales are supposed to have medicinal properties.

Both varieties of African grey parrots — Timneh parrots and Congo grey parrots — are endangered, even though they live in different ranges of Africa. Timneh parrots are mainly found in west Africa in countries like Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, while Congo grey parrots have a wider range in countries like the Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Burundi, Ghana, Nigeria and Rwanda. However, both types of parrots are generally referred to as African grey parrots.

These birds face many threats, including deforestation and the killing of wild parrots for bushmeat, particularly during famine in Uganda in the 1970s. However, a major threat to African grey parrots is still the pet trade.

Known as 197F, the wild tigress has been traveling on her own for four years, ever since she left the protected territory where she was first spotted as a cub.

Now people are rooting for her to find a mate and start her own family.

“She’s of prime breeding age and in good health,” Chris Hallam, conservation scientist at Panthera‘s tiger program, wrote in a statement, “but she’s all alone.”

When James arrived at the HSI rescue center in Montreal, Canada, he was still wary of people.

“He was very nervous,” Parascandola said. “For these guys, they don’t know they’re being rescued, so it’s very unsettling for them when they first get moved. I mean, there are a few of the dogs that are very social, and they adapt quite quickly … but for the other dogs, it takes a little while for them to feel comfortable in a new situation.”

Osin will be able to grow up in the wild, learning how to climb, forage and make nests, just like his mom. And hopefully this rare family will stay safe and strong, despite the threats, like habitat destruction and the exotic pet trade, that have led all three species of orangutans to be critically endangered.

I have used more Apple laptops in my life than I can even recall. I owned a second-hand, sticker-encrusted Titanium PowerBook G4 that was stolen during a road trip. I installed Linux on an excruciatingly slow PowerBook G3 for IMDB and Google searches while watching TV. I’ve upgraded, repaired, purchased, gifted, traded, and tinkered with iBooks and MacBooks galore, both for work and for fun.

However, the more recent MacBooks I’ve used have been a mixed bag. Not only are Apple’s last couple MacBook iterations unrepairable and non-upgradeable, but I find that the computing experience has been compromised in some key areas. Apple’s laptops used to be so competitive that I’d recommend them just for use with Windows. But then PC manufacturers started upping their game, and since late 2016, it’s been extremely hard to recommend the Pros. How did we get to this place?

The new 2018 MacBook Pros attempt to atone for some of the line’s recent performance missteps by throwing powerful new processors, tweaked graphics cards, a massaged keyboard, more RAM, and bigger SSDs into a product meant for the professionals who consistently rely on these machines. But over the past week that I’ve been using the new, 15-inch MacBook Pro running on a top-of-the-line Intel processor, I’ve found that what Apple’s offering has a surprising number of caveats—its eye-watering price tag among them—you’ll have to consider.

Cores Aplenty

Apple gets complaints from the Mac faithful. Mac fans are a passionate minority who like to kvetch about everything from file systems to UI consistency. The top complaint might be that the Cupertino company just isn’t as consistent at updating its products as other PC makers. For instance, the Mac mini continues to feature Intel chips from 2014. And desktop users still wait with bated breath for the triumphant return of the Mac Pro, which was last released in 2013 and…never got better internals.

Mac laptops have been updated more consistently, but as they’ve been updated, they’ve also shed some features (like popular ports) that have forced customers into what feels like laptop limbo where they can’t find a computer that meets all their needs. Thankfully, the eighth-generation Intel processors in the absolute newest MacBooks give pro users a big reason to consider upgrading. In every model, you’ll get more processor cores, better graphics (be they discrete or integrated) and overall faster performance.

This is especially the case with the 15-inch models. Apple pro laptops were capped at four cores for a long time—until now. The new eighth-gen Intel chips in these machines, no matter which 15-inch you pick up, now include two bonus cores. As muscle car fans might say, there’s no replacement for displacement, and these tiny silicon engines give you a whopping total of 6 cores and 12 threads, leaving previous Macs in the dust at the drag strip.

The 15-inch model I sampled sported 32 GB of RAM and a new Intel processor, the Core i9. Don’t let the confusing naming throw you off, though—this 6-core, 12-thread, $350 upgrade is just a faster i7. I was able to use the new MacBook Pro to encode a video into the demanding H.265 codec 26 percent faster than a previous, quad-core 15-inch Pro.

Our video and graphics team, who, let’s face it, are the real pro users at WIRED, put the i9 MacBook Pro through its paces as well. The Cinema4D performance from this laptop was impressive, and they noted a marked improvement in render times of 3-D frames with complex material reflections.

Most folks will opt for the cheaper i7-based models. I think that’s reasonable, given the kinds of money you can throw at a spec’d-out Pro. My review unit came with a blisteringly fast 2TB SSD as well, ringing the till at $4,700. If you opt for the 4TB SSD, the price blows beyond the $6K mark quickly, reaching $6,700 if you tick the box for every build-to-order hardware option available.

Accompanying the feats of logical strength was the MacBook Pro’s twin fan setup, which made its presence known by hissing like a white noise generator whenever extra power was called upon. It’s worth noting, as well, that my final tests were run afterApple’s performance patch was applied to the review system. After that update, I noticed significantly more consistent speeds with less fluctuation than before.

Though pros will appreciate the extra cores when it comes to rendering and compiling, I’m a semi-pro on the best of days. But even I was wowed by the additional headroom the new CPU grants users. I could keep working in Chrome while running an intensive app like Handbrake in the background without noticing much, if any, slowdown. There’s enough power for all kinds of multitasking, whether that means keeping more tabs open, granting a virtual machine an extra processor, or juggling Word and OneNote and Adobe Lightroom.

Battery life seemed pretty good, at least when the system wasn’t terribly taxed. I could easily make it through a few hours of light work and web use without getting range anxiety. Obviously, once you push the pedal to the floor, you’ll be able to watch the battery meter tick down, but I think any mobile workstation user already carries a power adapter at all times—at least Apple’s included white USB-C power brick is relatively compact.

Keyed Up

In the 2016 redesign of its top-tier notebooks, Apple switched out a tried-and-true scissor switch with the now-infamous butterfly mechanism, reducing key travel to a measly half a millimeter. The company spun the decision as one to increase the “stability” of said keys, though I don’t think that’s a complaint anyone ever had with the softer, more comfortable MacBook keyboards of yore.

Personally, I feel that in swapping the Pro keyboard for the shallow butterfly-style version, Apple severely damaged its MacBook Pro line. Anecdotal reliability issues aside (myself and coworkers have suffered through jammed key switches on our last-gen MacBooks, for what it’s worth), I was told by its defenders that the butterfly keyboard just “takes getting used to,” which isn’t something you could say about the excellent input devices built into the laptop’s forbears.

These new 2018 MacBook Pros have a similar butterfly keyboard mechanism. The choice is bound to be similarly controversial, even though Apple’s touting its improved switch design. Teardowns show that the new version of the keyboard adds a silicone baffle under each keycap. Whether it’s designed to keep dust from jamming up the switch or to simply muffle the sound of the keyboard is beside the point. I’d say that the new keyboard is a little quieter, but it mostly has a less obnoxious sonic signature. Instead of a high-pitched, clacky pocka-pocka-pocka echoing around your local café, you’ll now hear a slightly lower, less nervous sound. The new switches had a slightly softer feel to them, which my sensitive fingers appreciated.

But, for me, this is still a sub-par keyboard. I shouldn’t have to “get used to” a keyboard on a multi-thousand-dollar computer, and it shouldn’t make my hands hurt doing what it was designed to do. The older keyboards were better, and Mac users deserve a better typing experience for what they’re paying.

Touch Barflies

Then there’s the Touch Bar. Somewhere between a keyboard and a touchscreen, this tiny display sits atop the keyboard and offers up some alternative, touch-friendly controls. You can program it to display controls from third-party apps, like Adobe Photoshop, but I’ve found that the Touch Bar works best for me when it’s set up to act like a normal assortment of buttons.

While some pieces of software offer up some unique interactive experiences, I find the Touch Bar’s presence incredibly distracting—the lower strip flashes between controls as you click around, and it constantly draws my eyes away from the big, gorgeous Retina display that I’m supposed to be looking at. Y’know, that vivid, high-resolution screen where all the real work gets done? My twitchy peepers see a sudden pop of color or motion down below and they lock onto the Bar every. Single. Time.

The best part of the Touch Bar setup, however, is the inclusion of a fast, accurate fingerprint sensor for logins and for authorizing Apple Pay transactions. I would have loved for Apple to bring the iPhone X’s Face ID to the Mac, but given how long it took the company to grant the Mac any built-in biometric security, it’s likely going to be a while before we get facial recognition on an Apple laptop.

One thing Apple’s added to this batch of Pros is its True Tone color-shifting feature, first seen on the iPad Pro. This means the laptop, using ambient sensors, will adjust the tone of the screen based on the environment you’re working in. I think this is a nice-to-have for everyone but the pro users Apple hopes to win back. Meaning, it’s great for people who just want something that’s easy on the eyes, but pros working on visual projects might not always want a calibrated screen that skews color to match the lighting of the surrounding environment. Like the Touch Bar, this is a feature the MacBook Pro’s target audience might even disable as soon as they set up their new computer, making it a dubious value add.

Dongle Chaos

When Apple went all-in on USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 in the 2016 MacBook Pro, the change was surprising. Especially to pros with mountains of accessories and a workflow to maintain, it was understandably disruptive coming off the prior MacBook Pros—y’know, the old ones with the regular USB ports and HDMI and an SD card reader? Since then, the state of USB-C accessories has improved quite a bit, and those who need to remain on a MacBook Pro have adapted (heh) and accepted their new one-port-to-rule-them-all lord-of-the-ports USB-C.

And things are trending towards Apple’s precedent. More and more Windows laptops are adopting the Thunderbolt/USB-C setup because it has some advantages—it can be used for all kinds of peripherals from external GPUs to keyboards and mice. That said, Apple’s MacBook Pro is the lone pro-grade notebook that has nothing but Thunderbolt 3, and for some that’ll continue to be annoying.

People in hell want ice water, and creative pros in dongle hell want USB-A and an SD card reader. The ability to plug any device into any port, in any orientation is one thing. But diminished utility is another. For my day-to-day routine, fishing a USB-A to USB-C adapter out of my backpack just so I can occasionally authenticate using my YubiKey is vexing. I can only imagine what it’s like for working professionals to have to juggle adapters for hard drives, external displays, SD card readers, and other requisite peripherals. (Though I will admit, it’s also nice to top off my Nintendo Switch with a MacBook charger in a pinch.)

Does USB-C simplify the MacBook Pro? Yes. But it can put the burden on the user, something a truly elegant solution should never do.

Price and Compromises

When you spend a boatload of money on something, you expect it to satisfy your needs. With the 2018 MacBook Pro, it’ll depend—making it a hard decision. The model I tried was well-equipped with the Core i9 processor, 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a blisteringly-quick 2 TB SSD. The price? $4,700. Ouch.

For me, what you don’t get is almost as staggering as the price: there are no USB-C adapters in the box, the power cord no longer comes with an extension cord, everything is soldered down, making the MacBook Pro impervious to upgrades or emergency component swaps. Did the guy in seat 23B spill his ginger ale onto your Mac? Hope you backed up terabytes of your client’s work before boarding—the $1,400 SSD might have survived unscathed, but it’s wedded to a RAM chip that was bathed in fizz and now your laptop won’t boot.

It used to be that when you bought a MacBook Pro, you got the best hardware around, along with the best operating system. Increasingly, these MacBooks feel like they beat up on the Mac faithful for favoring that ecosystem. It’s an exercise in maddening compromises: with the 2018 Pro, you’ll get the fastest-ever mobile Intel chips, but that silicon is saddled to a laptop with a keyboard that’s just not great. You’ll finally get the option to get 32 GB of RAM, but you’ll have to carry a gaggle of dongles everywhere you go. You’ll get a gorgeous display, but it’s not true 4K.

And, even with the performance updates in place, the thin chassis of the MacBook Pro will likely never let the hot Core i9 chip run at its maximum advertised Turbo Boost speeds, at least not for more than a fleeting moment. The laws of physics still apply, no matter how chic your industrial design appears.

What adds insult to injury is that better-than-ever notebooks on the Windows side of the fence don’t carry a lot of those compromises. But you certainly won’t be able to run Apple’s macOS on them—and if you need a powerful, portable Mac, this is the option you have.

When you spend a ton of cold, hard, cash on something, you should get everything you need. Unfortunately, Mac users can only buy hardware from one source—Apple. Apple’s made a lot of noise lately about taking the needs of pros seriously. But I’ve used this finished product for a while and have to wonder about that. Because, if you let creative professionals design the 2018 MacBook Pro, I think it’d look a whole lot different than it does right now. I think it would be more modular, have a higher-res screen, a normal keyboard without a superfluous Touch Bar, and a wider array of useful ports.

But the trackpad, that can stay. That part they got right.

“The moment the dog truck was forced to stop, the dogs seemed to know their plight was ending,” Peter J. Li, Ph.D., China policy specialist for HSI, told The Dodo. “At the animal hospital, the 20 dogs in the HSI-funded facility were extremely cooperative with the vets.”

Due to being forcefully crammed into the tiny cages, many of the dogs were suffering from wounds and broken bones. Some were riddled with flies and maggots — and others were diagnosed with distemper, a highly contagious virus that can cause widespread infection within groups of dogs.

Unfortunately, 13 of the over 200 dogs passed away shortly after rescue.

When this veteran came home from Afghanistan, coping with post-combat life was practically impossible. That was until she met Lazer. Lazer, a black lab and service dog, was matched with her though the K9s for Warriors program, a non-profit that trains canines for their new jobs. K9s for Warriors relies on donations from brands like Merrick — which has been supporting the organization for years.

Brutus has been looking for a home for two long years now, and the team at Adoption First Animal Rescue is anxious for him to find his forever family.

“He will talk to you, he smiles all the time and he’s just excited to see you, no matter what the circumstances,” Nicole Johnson, a volunteer at Adoption First Animal Rescue, told The Dodo. “He’s very loyal, so once he has his person, he’s very attached to them and listens to them on command immediately.”

They say opposites attract — and with Ryker and Bailey, it couldn’t be more true.

While Ryker, a German shepherd, is hyper, Bailey, a golden retriever, is calm.

Ryker is naturally outgoing and loves meeting new friends, while Bailey is shy and needs some encouragement. But, put the two dogs together, and you’ve got a perfect match.

And their owners are so glad they found each other.

The discovery of the fashionable urchin is also a grim reminder of how much plastic trash there is in the ocean. It’s expected that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. It’s estimated that right now there are an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of the ocean. Considering it takes hundreds, sometimes even a thousand years, for plastic to degrade, the plastic trash that ends up there will be there for a very long time unless people do more to help.

Their adventures have brought them to some of the most beautiful places on the planet — but they have also gained new insight into the status of the Earth today.

When the family was visiting Belize, for example, they came upon an island called Moho Caye. “It is a tiny island, about 8 acres, and has a caretaker living there full-time,” Corbe said. “Where we landed, the beach is immaculate because he keeps it clean.”

But then the family walked to the other side of the island.

Cizek was visiting the lake last month, scouting out locations to take some wildlife photos from his small boat, when an unusual scene was presented to him in the distance.

There, paddling along in the flicking waves, was an enormous feathered family — bigger than any Cizek had encountered before.

“I noticed a bird with a ton of babies, so I turned my trolling motor hard right to investigate,” he told The Dodo. “Once I got closer, I noticed it was a merganser [a type of duck], and was simply amazed by how many babies it had with it.”

“Most people, including some vets, would never guess he’s blind as he’s so adaptive to his surroundings and intelligent in how he navigates the world,” Sarah Bowley, Linguini’s mom, told The Dodo. “He has never let it hold him back and does everything that our other dogs do. In fact, he may be the bravest one out of all of them!”

Linguini is a very social dog who loves meeting new people and dog friends. He gets so excited every time he comes across a new dog to play with — but unfortunately, sometimes his intense excitement is too much for other dogs to handle.

On Thursday afternoon, Puppy’s owner had gone for a horseback ride in the woods and, true to his youthful name, Puppy eagerly decided to tag along. When Puppy’s owner spotted him following behind she turned around and headed home, but on the way back the dog and his owner got separated.

Volunteers searched the woods for the lost dog without luck. Alone in the darkness, Puppy couldn’t even hear his rescuers call his name.

The Saturday morning after Puppy went missing, Tino and Branson met the lost dog’s owner in the woods to retrace her steps.

“It took 90 minutes for the owner to locate the point she had last seen Puppy because things look different in twilight,” Branson said. “Once I presented the scent article (some of Puppy’s fur from his bed) to Tino, he took off running on the scent trail.”

The baby wombat tore across the road in Victoria, Australia, hiding among some dried grass and brush plants — and she refused to come out.

Moments before, a local woman had found the baby wombat curled up with her mom’s body — sadly, the mom had died after being hit by a car. But when the woman tried approaching the baby wombat to help her, the little animal had run away.

In 2005, my friend Mike bought an old and unreliable Infiniti G20 sedan in England for the equivalent of $750, did some emergency repairs, then drove it across Europe and down to Senegal. That was a long time ago, and now that I think of it, I wonder if he ever showered on that trip. But he recently took one look at the slow cooker I was reviewing and immediately wished out loud that he’d had it with him.

“We had a plug in the back,” he said, reminiscing about cooking eggs on the radiator and eating uncooked ramen noodle packs. “This would have been perfect.”

Mike and I were marinara-making, getting ready to enjoy the kind of deep-flavored food you can make simply by letting something cook quietly over the course of the day. The appliance we used worked like an old-school slow cooker, but it looked like none I’d ever seen.

The Presto Nomad is a short, squat machine that looks more like an Igloo Playmate cooler than a Crock-Pot. With a low, rectangular body, a large carry handle that swings up over the top, and eye-catching colors, it’s like they told a chef and a children’s toy designer who’d never heard of a slow cooker to invent one, adding one stipulation: that it be made to travel.

Slow cookers have struggled a bit trying to compete with the growing popularity of electric pressure cookers, many of which can also slow cook, albeit not always as well. Yet slow cookers’ convenience is undeniable: throw a few ingredients in a pot in the morning and return home to something with deep flavor that beats the pants off of most stuff you could blitz through after work.

In terms of cooking functionality, the Nomad is barely different from the slow cooker you grew up with. It has “warm,” “low,” and “high” settings on its dial. Its “crock” is a nonstick aluminum “cooking pot” that is heated with an element that runs around its sidewall.

The big difference is in the design of the thing, especially that low, cooler-like body, a large, flat lid with a glass window, and the huge handle that clamps the lid shut. It’s peculiarly interesting to see new life and whimsical thinking thrown into a staid genre by a company that isn’t known for innovation.

Like the Balmuda toaster, the fun, two-tone design of the Nomad makes your countertop a happier place. My wife Elisabeth took to calling it “the cute little red thing.” I think it’s going to be the belle of the ball come tailgating season.

When you want to hit the road with the Nomad, flip up that handle to lock the lid in place, tuck the power cord back into its slot, and it’s ready to roll. Stick it in the trunk or take it for a walk—then compare it to that old one in your pantry with its rattling lid and the way you have to hold it between someone’s feet so the lid doesn’t fall off in the car on the way to Uncle Charlie’s house. Yes, some newer slow cookers have clips to hold their lids in place, but the Nomad’s low center of gravity and one-handed ease make it much better suited to travel. As one Amazon reviewer put it, the Nomad is “the only way to eat ten sloppy joes in your car.” My friend Mike would approve.

Slow Motion

None of that would make any difference if it struggled in the kitchen, but in my testing it didn’t. Along with that marinara, I braised chicken thighs in kimchi, had fantastic mac and cheese for lunch several days in a row, and made a lovely Spanish tortilla. Every recipe I cooked finished in the recipe’s estimated cooking time. No dishes required special treatment. In fact, for most reviews, I take pages and pages of cooking notes, but I barely took any on the Nomad because it worked exactly like it should. I came to think of it like a new kid on the block who behaved like a grown-up.

One thing I learned during this testing is how the heat settings on slow cookers work, and I turned to an expert to help me figure it out.

“On the high setting, more energy is produced to heat the food both faster and to a slightly higher temperature than on the low setting,” explained Caitlin Huth, a nutrition and wellness educator at the University of Illinois Extension in Decatur. Huth explained that “low” and “high” settings are misnomers that might be better labeled “slow” and “a little faster.”

Really, if you think of the temperature just below boiling as a destination that both of them are heading toward, on most machines high just gets there faster than low. In the Nomad, it took just over five hours on low to bring four quarts of room temperature water up to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit, while the high setting took only 3.75 hours.

(Also, this isn’t a knock against slow cookers, but more of a PSA: during low-temperature cooking and while you’re transporting your meal, keep food safety in mind and avoid lingering in the danger zone between 40 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Along with its portability, the Nomad features bells and whistles like a detachable spoon rest and a tiny dry-erase board and marker next to the dial so you can write “TUNA NOODLE CASSEROLE!!!” on the front and everyone will instantly know what goodness lurks beneath the potato chip crust.

The Nomad has some deficiencies, most notably that the height of the cooking pot makes slow-cooking a whole chicken or ribs—which are doable in a taller 6-quart oval crock—challenging or impossible in the 6-quart Presto (4 1/4 inches high) cooking pot, though there’s more room (5 3/4 inches) in the 8-quart model. I’d also prefer a glass crock instead of the metal nonstick, but that would make the whole shebang notably heavier and less transportable. For now, there are two models; the 6-quart is white and red, and the 8-quart is white and an odd tan color. I wish the 8-quart had other color options. I also wish there was a little “power” light to indicate that it was on; More than once, I turned the dial to “low” and walked away without having remembered to plug it in.

Really though, you’d get over those faults in a heartbeat the first time you packed it up to go tailgating or just walked it up the hill to the neighbors’ place for a potluck.

The Nomad isn’t necessarily the best slow cooker out there. It doesn’t have the programmability of most modern models. It didn’t work noticeably better or worse than others I’ve used in the past, but since it has the basics down, head-to-head testing isn’t the point. What I’m so enamored with is its complete rethink of slow-cooker design. The Nomad is blazing a new trail for slow cookers and I hope the rest of the industry follows.

Food writer Joe Ray (@joe_diner) is a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of The Year, a restaurant critic, and author of “Sea and Smoke” with chef Blaine Wetzel.