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Cats, Science/Nature

Friday Catblogging: The Genetics of Orange-Colored Cats

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Embed from Getty Images Two new studies identify the genetics behind orange house cats: Now two papers, published concurrently on Thursday in Current Biology,reveal a remarkably unique genetic pathway that has never been seen in other felines—or any other mammals. With their colleagues, two separate groups at Stanford University and Kyushu University in Japan independently arrived at the same surprising…

Adventure, Cats, Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.11.25: A Spring Walk

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Good morning. Mother’s Day in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:36 and sunset is 8:07, for 14 hours, 31 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1997,  Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, defeats Garry Kasparov in the last…

Cats, Good Ideas

Friday Catblogging: Up North Cat Condo-24/7 Livestream

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In Minnesota, there’s a livestream of a cat condo for feral felines: Here’s the link: Up North Cat Condo-24/7 Livestream. Sam Stroozas reports: Everything started in the dead of this winter when Jill [VanDette] started catching glimpses of a thin, feral cat in her yard. The cat was scared and would rarely come up close…

Cats, Daily Bread, Weather

Daily Bread for 2.15.25: Ready for the Weather

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 33. Sunrise is 6:51 and sunset is 5:26, for 10 hours, 35 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1989, the Soviet Union officially announces that all of its troops have left Afghanistan.

Winter requires the right gear:

Preparing NASA’s CADRE Moon Rovers for Launch:

Three small lunar rovers were packed up at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the first leg of their multistage journey to the Moon. These suitcase-size rovers, along with a base station and camera system that will record their travels on the lunar surface, make up NASA’s CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) technology demonstration. CADRE aims to prove that a group of robots can collaborate to gather data without receiving direct commands from mission controllers on Earth, paving the way for potential future multirobot missions. Seen here are tests of the CADRE software in January 2024 and scenes of a rover getting flipped over, attached to an aluminum plate for transit, and sealed into a protective metal-frame enclosure that was later packed into a metal shipping container a year later, in January 2025. The hardware was transported from JPL to Intuitive Machines’ Houston facility, where it will be integrated with the company’s Nova-C lander. Intuitive Machines’ third lunar mission (IM-3), which has a mission window extending into early 2026, will deliver CADRE and other NASA payloads to the Moon’s Reiner Gamma region. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages CADRE for the Game Changing Development program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. IM-3 is a mission under NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, which is managed by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.