Sweden's armed forces conducted the Aurora 26 military exercise from late April to mid-May 2026, involving about 18,000 troops from 13 countries, making it the largest national military exercise in Sweden since the 1990s. ^[1] University of Arizona researchers developed AURAL-Pet, the first reliable tool to analyze how people talk to their pets on a day-to-day basis. ^[2] A peer-reviewed report published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry described the Aurora 26 exercise segment as including more than 500 dummies and body bags representing fallen service members, a scale not attempted in Sweden since the early 1950s. ^[3] The Aurora 26 exercise tested the entire chain of handling war casualties: recovery, identification, notifying allied embassies and the International Committee of the Red Cross, and burial with military honors. ^[4] The Church of Sweden, which remains legally responsible for burials, has long been tasked with planning capacity for burials equal to 5% of the national population, about 500,000 people, a Cold War civil defense standard. ^[5] AURAL-Pet is a coding system comprising a checklist of categories including praise, questions, commands, and frustration, used to mark interactions in audio recordings. ^[6] Dr. Emily Bray, senior author and assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, stated that objective data is needed to explore why pets affect the well-being of some owners more than others. ^[7] The study found that pet owners spend one-tenth of their total talking time with their pets and that no two owners sound alike. ^[8]