Sam Jones reports Huge cat found etched into desert among Nazca Lines in Peru: The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an enormous cat…
Science/Nature
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Cats Along the Silk Road
by JOHN ADAMS •
Science Magazine has an article asking readers Care For Cats? So Did People Along The Silk Road More Than 1,000 Years Ago: Common domestic cats, as we know them today, might have accompanied Kazakh pastoralists as pets more than 1,000 years ago. This has been indicated by new analyses done on an almost complete cat skeleton…
Federal Government, Science/Nature, William Barr
Attorney General William Barr Fails Chemistry (and Trial Advocacy)
by JOHN ADAMS •
On CBS’s Face the Nation, United States Attorney General William Barr offered his scientific assessment of the use of pepper spray, by contending that “pepper spray is not a chemical irritant…it’s not a chemical.” (See transcript, Face the Nation, 6.7.20). As science — This is false – and wackily ignorant: of course pepper spray is…
Animals, Coronavirus, Public Health, Science/Nature
Prudent Human Changes Concerning Exotic Animals
by JOHN ADAMS •
Karin Brulliard reports The next pandemic is already coming, unless humans change how we interact with wildlife, scientists say: The new coronavirus, which has traversed the globe to infect more than 1 million people, began like so many pandemics and outbreaks before: inside an animal. The virus’s original host was almost certainly a bat, scientists…
Animals, Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: In a First, Cheetah Cubs Born Through Surrogacy at the Columbus Zoo
by JOHN ADAMS •
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Ways Your Cat May Be Controlling You
by JOHN ADAMS •
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Cats’ Facial Expressions
by JOHN ADAMS •
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,…
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…