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Science/Nature

Friday Catblogging: The Slow Blink

Embed from Getty Images Michelle Starr writes Scientists Confirm You Can Communicate With Your Cat by Blinking Very Slowly: In a study published in 2020, scientists observed cat-human interactions, and were able to confirm that this act of blinking slowly makes cats – both familiar and unfamiliar animals – approach and be receptive to humans. ….…

Friday Catblogging: Using AI Facial Recognition to Conserve Pumas

Ashleigh Papp, over at Scientific American, reports How AI Facial Recognition Is Helping Conserve Pumas: INTRO: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Ashleigh Papp. Papp: Mountain lions are now posing for their close ups. Researchers based in the greater Yellowstone National Park area have figured out a new way to identify these cats by using…

Friday Catblogging: Cats’ Spooky Eyes

Helen Czerski writes Behind the Spooky Eyes of Cats (‘Like scarier nighttime predators, cats have slit pupils that help them to judge distance and ambush their prey’): Halloween is approaching, and a whiff of ghoulish menace is squatting casually in the darkness of London’s evenings. Ghostly figures, silhouettes of witches and jagged glowing teeth loom…

Friday Catblogging: Cats Have Attachment Styles

In Current Biology, Kristyn R. Vitale, Alexandra C. Behnke, and Monique A.R. Udell have reported their findings on Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans. Here is a summary of their report, with the full study available online: Worldwide, domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) outnumber domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Despite cats’ success in human environments,…

Friday Catblogging: Siamese Cats as Heat Maps

Annie Rauwerda writes Siamese cats are heatmaps of themselves: Siamese cats are walking heatmaps. Their characteristic coloration results from a delightful mutation (maybe I should call it a mew-tation) in tyrosinase, an enzyme that makes melanin. A deleted cytosine amino acid causes a frameshift mutation. The result? Tyrosinase in Siamese cats is particularly sensitive to…

Friday Catblogging: Tabbies

James Gorman reports How the Cat Gets Its Stripes: A team of geneticists reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications that it had identified a gene in domestic cats that plays a key role in creating the traditional tabby stripe pattern, and that the pattern is evident in embryonic tissue even before hair follicles start…

Daily Bread for 9.7.21: Formation, General

Good morning. Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning thundershowers with a high of 78. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 50m 22s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated. The Whitewater  Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.  On this day in 1776, according to American colonial reports, Ezra Lee…