Technologies

A Coyote Unexpectedly Killed a Human in 2009. Scientists Now Know Why

It’s likely due to an unexpected dietary adaptation.

In 2009, 19-year-old folk singer Taylor Mitchell was attacked by a pack of coyotes while on a hike at the Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Canada. She was just about to start the popular Skyline Trail when climbers in the area saw the animals close- in, unprovoked.

Onlookers called 911, and Mitchell was airlifted to a hospital in Halifax, but 12 hours later, she died from her injuries.

This marked the very first documentation of a coyote attack in North America that resulted in a human adult fatality (in 1981, 3-year-old Kelly Keene was killed by a coyote on her family’s property), raising questions about whether it’s no longer safe to co-exist with these furry mammals.

«We didn’t have good answers,» Stan Gehrt, a professor in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources and leader of the Urban Coyote Research Project, said in a statement.

But after conducting a multi-year investigation into the incident, Gehrt appears to have offered some insight into the situation at last.

According to a paper published last month in the Journal of Applied Ecology, he along with a crew of wildlife researchers found that coyotes in the region of Mitchell’s attack have adopted an unusual dietary change. Rather than rely on smaller mammals like rodents, birds and snakes for food, they seem to be hunting moose for their meals due to extreme climate conditions forcing the former to move away.

As such, the team believes it’s possible these coyotes learned to attack larger mammals, like humans, and are therefore more prone to killing people.

«We’re describing these animals expanding their niche to basically rely on moose. And we’re also taking a step forward and saying it’s not just scavenging that they were doing, but they were actually killing moose when they could. It’s hard for them to do that, but because they had very little if anything else to eat, that was their prey,» Gehrt said. «And that leads to conflicts with people that you wouldn’t normally see.»

Coyote forensics

Before and after the 2009 tragedy, Gehrt’s project noticed a few dozen less-severe human-coyote incidents in the park as well. He and colleagues even fitted them with what are basically GPS trackers so they could document the animals’ movements and better understand why they were behaving in such surprisingly vicious ways.

«We had been telling communities and cities that the relative risk that coyotes pose is pretty low, and even when you do have a conflict where a person is bitten, it’s pretty minor,» he said. «The fatality was tragic and completely off the charts. I was shocked by it — just absolutely shocked.»

To arrive at their conclusions — that coyotes in Cape Breton National Park were feasting on large moose – the team first collected whiskers of both the coyotes implicated in Mitchell’s death and those related to other more minor incidents between 2011 and 2013. They then collected fur from a wide range of potential coyote prey such as shrews, southern red-backed voles, snowshoe hare, moose and even humans — for humans, they gathered hair from local barber shops.

Seth Newsome, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and corresponding author of the study, performed an analysis of specific carbon and nitrogen isotopes within all the samples.

Eventually, Newsome confirmed that, on average, moose constituted between half and two-thirds of the animals’ diets, followed by snowshoe hare, small mammals and deer, according to the press release. Plus, the researchers analyzed coyote droppings, which confirmed the isotope findings further.

Interestingly, they also only found a few examples of individuals having eaten human food, debunking any claims that coyotes’ attraction to human food might’ve been a factor in Mitchell’s attack.

«These coyotes are doing what coyotes do, which is, when their first or second choice of prey isn’t available, they’re going to explore and experiment and change their search range,» Gehrt said. «They’re adaptable, and that is the key to their success.»

From those movement devices, the team tested to see whether coyotes in the park were just familiar with people. However, patterns showed that the animals largely avoided areas of the park frequented by people. Instead, they preferred walking around at night.

«The lines of evidence suggest that this was a resource-poor area with really extreme environments that forced these very adaptable animals to expand their behavior,» Gehrt said. Or as the paper puts it, «our results suggest extreme unprovoked predatory attacks by coyotes on people are likely to be quite rare and associated with unique ecological characteristics.»

Technologies

Google races to put Gemini at the center of Android before Apple’s AI reboot

Google is using its latest Android rollout to position Gemini as the AI layer across phones, Chrome, laptops and cars.

Google is using its latest Android rollout to make Gemini less of a chatbot and more of an operating layer across the phone, browser, car and laptop, just weeks before Apple is expected to show its own Gemini-powered Apple Intelligence reboot at WWDC.
Ahead of its Google I/O developer conference next week, the company previewed a number of Android updates, including AI-powered app automation, a smarter version of Chrome on Android, new tools for creators, a redesigned Android Auto experience, and a sweeping set of new security features.
Alphabet is counting on Gemini to help Google compete directly with OpenAI and Anthropic in the market for artificial intelligence models and services, while also serving as the AI backbone across its expansive portfolio of products, including Android. Meanwhile, Gemini is powering part of Apple’s new AI strategy, giving Google a role in the iPhone maker’s reset even as it races to prove its own version of personal AI on the phone is further along.
Sameer Samat, who oversees Google’s Android ecosystem, told CNBC that Google is rebuilding parts of Android around Gemini Intelligence to help users complete everyday tasks more easily.
“We’re transitioning from an operating system to an intelligence system,” he said.
As part of Tuesday’s announcements. Google said Gemini Intelligence will be able to move across apps, understand what’s on the screen and complete tasks that would normally require a user to jump between multiple services. That means Android is moving beyond the traditional assistant model, where users ask a question and get an answer, and acting more like an agent.
For instance, Google says Gemini can pull relevant information from Gmail, build shopping carts and book reservations. Samat gave the example of asking Gemini to look at the guest list for a barbecue, build a menu, add ingredients to an Instacart list and return for approval before checkout.
A big concern surrounding agentic AI involves software taking action on a user’s behalf without permissions. Samat said Gemini will come back to the user before completing a transaction, adding, “the human is always in the loop.”
Four months after announcing its Gemini deal with Google, Apple is under pressure to show a more capable version of Apple Intelligence, which has been a relative laggard on the market. Apple has long framed privacy, hardware integration and control of the user experience as its advantages.
Google’s Android push is designed to show it can bring AI deeper into the device experience while still giving users control over what Gemini can see, where it can act and when it needs confirmation.
The app automation features will roll out in waves, starting with the latest Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones this summer, before expanding across more Android devices, including watches, cars, glasses and laptops later this year.
The company is also redesigning Android Auto around Gemini, turning the car into another major surface for its assistant. Android Auto is in more than 250 million cars, and Google says the new release includes its biggest maps update in a decade and Gemini-powered help with tasks like ordering dinner while driving.
Alphabet’s AI strategy has been embraced by Wall Street, which has pushed the company’s stock price up more than 140% in the past year, compared to Apple’s roughly 40% gain. Investors now want to see how Gemini can become more central to the products people use every day.
WATCH: Alphabet briefly tops Nvidia after report of $200 billion Anthropic cloud deal

Technologies

Waymo recalls 3,800 robotaxis after glitch allowed some vehicles to ‘drive into standing water’

Waymo issued a voluntary recall of about 3,800 of its robotaxis to fix software issues that could allow them to drive into flooded roadways.

Waymo is recalling about 3,800 robotaxis in the U.S. to fix software issues that could allow them to “drive onto a flooded roadway,” according to a letter on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website.
The voluntary recall is for Waymo vehicles that use the company’s fifth and sixth generation automated driving systems (or ADS), the U.S. auto safety regulator said in the letter posted Tuesday.
Waymo autonomous vehicles in Austin, Texas, were seen on camera driving onto a flooded street and stalling, requiring other drivers to navigate around them. It’s the latest example of a safety-related issue for the Alphabet-owned AV unit that’s rapidly bolstering its fleet of vehicles and entering new U.S. markets.
Waymo has drawn criticism for its vehicles failing to yield to school buses in Austin, and for the performance of its vehicles during widespread power outages in San Francisco in December, when robotaxis halted in traffic, causing gridlock.
The company said in a statement on Tuesday that it’s “identified an area of improvement regarding untraversable flooded lanes specific to higher-speed roadways,” and opted to file a “voluntary software recall” with the NHTSA.
“Waymo provides over half a million trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments across the U.S., and safety is our primary priority,” the company said.
Waymo added that it’s working on “additional software safeguards” and has put “mitigations” in place, limiting where its robotaxis operate during extreme weather, so that they avoid “areas where flash flooding might occur” in periods of intense rain.
WATCH: Waymo launches new autonomous system in Chinese-made vehicle

Technologies

Qualcomm tumbles 13% as semiconductor stocks retreat from historic AI-fueled surge

Semiconductor equities reversed sharply after a broad AI-driven advance, with Qualcomm suffering its worst day since 2020 amid inflation concerns and rising oil prices.

Semiconductor stocks fell sharply on Tuesday, reversing course after an extensive rally that had expanded the artificial intelligence investment theme well past Nvidia and driven the industry to unprecedented levels.

Qualcomm plunged 13% and was on track for its steepest single-day decline since 2020. Intel shed 8%, while On Semiconductor and Skyworks Solutions each lost more than 6%. The iShares Semiconductor ETF, which benchmarks the overall sector, fell 5%.

The sell-off came after a key gauge of consumer prices came in above forecasts, and as conflict in Iran pushed crude oil higher—prompting investors to shift away from riskier assets.

The preceding advance had widened the AI opportunity set beyond longtime industry leader Nvidia, which for much of the past several years had largely carried the market to new peaks on its own.

Explosive appetite for central processing units, along with the graphics processing units that power large language models, has sent chipmakers to all-time highs.

Market participants are wagering that the shift from AI model training to autonomous agents will lift demand for additional AI hardware. Among the beneficiaries are memory chip producers, which are raising prices as supply remains tight.

Micron Technology slid 6%, and Sandisk cratered 8%. Sandisk’s stock has surged more than six times over since January.