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Cats, Science/Nature

Friday Catblogging: Cats Have Attachment Styles

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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,…

Cats, Science/Nature

Friday Catblogging: Siamese Cats as Heat Maps

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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…

Cats, Nature, Science/Nature

Friday Catblogging: Tabbies

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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…

Cats

Friday Catblogging: Cat Rescues Octogenarian Who Fell into Ravine

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Mira Pitofsky reports An elderly woman went missing after falling down a ravine. Her cat led rescuers to her: A cat in the United Kingdom rescued his 83-year-old owner after she fell into a ravine by attracting the attention of bystanders with his meowing. Police in Bodmin, located in Cornwall, England, shared on Facebook last…

Cats, Medicine, Science/Nature

Friday Catblogging: Cats’ Genomes

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In One More Thing We Have in Common With Cats, Katherine Wu writes about the similarities between feline and human genomes: Cats, it turns out, harbor genomes that look and behave remarkably like ours. “Other than primates, the cat-human comparison is one of the closest you can get,” with respect to genome organization, Leslie Lyons, an…

Cats, Games/Puzzles

Friday Catblogging: Stray Walkthrough

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Game producer Swann talks about the world of Stray, as well as what to expect with gameplay and characters you’ll come across as a cat. Coming early 2022 to PS5, PS4, and Steam. The good news: it looks exciting. The bad news: it’s not out until early 2022. (Time to revise one’s 2021 Christmas list.)…