Karin Brulliard reports on a study of cats’ facial expressions in Cats do have facial expressions, but you probably can’t read them: Cats have a reputation for being “inscrutable,” the researchers say, and their results mostly back up this notion. More than 6,000 study participants in 85 countries, the vast majority of them cat owners,…
Science/Nature
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Scientific Confirmation that Cats Become Attached to People
by JOHN ADAMS •
Caitlin O’Kane reports Cats actually do get attached to their owners, study says: “Dog people” and “cat people” have long debated which pet is better. A new study is putting one preconceived notion about stand-offish felines to bed. The study published in Current Biology dug deep into cats’ sometimes misunderstood relationships with humans, and found the…
Babbittry, Boosterism, CDA, Foxconn, Mendacity, Reasoning, Science/Nature, That Which Paved the Way, Waste Digesters, WEDC
Junk Reasoning Isn’t Simply a Problem at the Top
by JOHN ADAMS •
Helena Bottemiller Evich reports ‘It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie’ (‘A top climate scientist quit USDA, following others who say Trump has politicized science’): One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how…
America, City, Film, History, Science/Nature, Space
Apollo 11: NASA and Civilians Remember the Moon Landing
by JOHN ADAMS •
“It was a feeling that went throughout the world, almost like an electric bolt,” one woman remembers of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The lunar landing, which celebrates its 50th anniversary on July 20, is collectively remembered in the film by a handful of the 530 million people who watched the event live on national…
Education, Science/Nature
Nutty Stories Don’t Seem Nutty to the Unprepared
by JOHN ADAMS •
Hobbes famously observed that reason is a spy for the passions (“the Thoughts, are to the Desires, as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired”). Whatever else one may think of Hobbes, in this he was, sadly, too often correct. So when one reads a story that battens…
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Catcams for Science
by JOHN ADAMS •
Karin Bruillard reports Catcam videos reveal cats don’t sleep all day. (Just some of it.): What does a cat do when nobody’s looking? One way to find out is to set up a pet cam to spy on kitty at home. Another way is to put little video cameras on cats’ collars, set the animals…
Cats, Science/Nature, UW Madison
Friday Catblogging: UW-Madison Students Design New Back Legs for Injured Cat
by JOHN ADAMS •
Cats, Photography, Science/Nature
Fridat Catblogging: Why a cat [almost] always lands on its feet
by JOHN ADAMS •
Cats, Science/Nature
The Genetic Secrets of Celebrity Cat Lil Bub
by JOHN ADAMS •
View this post on Instagram BUB sees stuff that we don’t. #lilbub #scienceandmagic #goodjobbub A post shared by Lil BUB (@iamlilbub) on Feb 21, 2019 at 1:53pm PST Karin Bruillard reports Scientists have finally discovered what makes celebrity cat Lil Bub so ‘magical’: Lil Bub is a kitten-size cat with 2 million Instagram followers,…
Animals, Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: It’s not the cat…
by JOHN ADAMS •
Derek Beres writes Are cats jerks? Or are YOU the jerk?: To claim that cats aren’t social is simply a way to claim your ignorance about this particular animal. Which is the topic of a new study, conducted by researchers at Oregon State University and published in the journal Behavioral Processes. In the first experiment, a total of…
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: What Cats Think
by JOHN ADAMS •
Felicity Muth writes What We Understand about Cats and What They Understand about Us: One way in which we frequently attempt to interact with the animals that live with us is by pointing at things. It is possible that this shows our limitations rather than our animal friends since this is a particularly human means…
Cats, Science/Nature
That Time a Cat Co-Authored a Physics Paper
by JOHN ADAMS •
Eric Grundhauser writes In 1975, a Cat Co-Authored a Physics Paper: Jack H. Hetherington was a professor of physics at Michigan State University in 1975, when he finished what would become an influential and often-cited physics paper. The academic writing, entitled Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He, was an in-depth exploration of…
Education, Mendacity, Science/Nature, Technology, Trump
For Mr. Trump, It’s STEM, Schwem, Whatever…
by JOHN ADAMS •
Embed from Getty Images In response to a question about whether state-sponsored hacking against an American political party should go unpunished, Donald Trump grew expansive, giving his typically thoughtful perspective on science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and (even) epistemology: “I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very…
