Good morning. Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 60. Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:18 PM for 14h 53m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1968, Milwaukee’s NBA franchise suggests the name “Milwaukee Bucks” “after 14,000…
Science/Nature
Daily Bread, Natural Disasters, Science/Nature, Weather
Daily Bread for 3.26.22: Why Dixie is the new Tornado Alley
by JOHN ADAMS •
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Cats’ Spooky Eyes
by JOHN ADAMS •
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…
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Cats Have Attachment Styles
by JOHN ADAMS •
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
by JOHN ADAMS •
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
by JOHN ADAMS •
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…
Books, Culture, Daily Bread, Education, Fact Checking, Far-Right Populism, Law, Medicine, Populists, Reading, Reasoning, School District, Science/Nature
Daily Bread for 9.7.21: Formation, General
by JOHN ADAMS •
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…
Cats, Medicine, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Cats’ Genomes
by JOHN ADAMS •
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…
Documentary, Film, Science/Nature
I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It
by JOHN ADAMS •
? Growing up in a Quaker household, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was raised to believe that she had as much right to an education as anyone else. But as a girl in the 1940s in Northern Ireland, her enthusiasm for the sciences was met with hostility from teachers and male students. Undeterred, she went on to…
City, Coronavirus, Culture, Education, Public Health, School District, Science/Nature
Wise Words for Whitewater from Steak-umm
by JOHN ADAMS •
There’s a thread on Twitter from Steak-umm (an American brand of thin-sliced frozen steaks) that does a better job (truly) discussing the role of science and skepticism about the pandemic than much of what’s published online. The full thread is available at Twitter, and excerpts are imediately below. It’s spot-on for Whitewater. (Note: the thread…
Art, Cartoons & Comics, Education, Science/Nature, Technology
From Comic-Con@Home 2021: The Science of Art
by JOHN ADAMS •
How is STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) used to inspire and create our most beloved popular arts? What do portrayals of science and scientists in popular media get right and wrong? From world-building to special effects and cosplay, IF/THEN ambassadors (www.ifthenshecan.org) Sydney Hamilton (aerospace engineer), Myria Perez (paleontologist), Dr. Samantha Thi Porter (archaeologist), and Dr.…
Coronavirus, Culture, Politics, Public Health, School District, Science/Nature
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Science
by JOHN ADAMS •
It seemed reasonable, months ago, to wait until the end of the 2020-2021 school year to assess how well the Whitewater Unified School District managed the pandemic. It doesn’t seem so reasonable now, for reasons of culture as much as public health. Generally – and sensibly – one has reason to be skeptical of lay…
Science/Nature, Sen. Ron Johnson, What Me Worry?
Famous Moments in Climatology: Sen. Ron Johnson Shares His Insights
by JOHN ADAMS •
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Why Cats Do These 6 Things
by JOHN ADAMS •
Narimes Parakul writes Why your cat does these 6 things, according to science: Having a cat (or several) can add companionship and warmth to any household. As you share each other’s space, however, you may have noticed a few quirks that your cat exhibits, varying from adorable to plainly bizarre. Emma Grigg, animal behaviorist with…