Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 52. Sunrise is 6:36 and sunset is 4:39 for 10 hours 3 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected for a record fourth term as President of the United States.
The Nature Conservancy has advanced conservation in the Midwest for generations. Here’s a quick retrospective on that commendable work:
The shocking truth about Chihuahuas — Scientists find Chihuahuas share [some of the] same genetic makeup as coyotes:
Professional reporting on the study of Chihuahuas’ genetic heritage may be found at Tiny Chihuahuas Hold a Big Surprise: A Sliver of Coyote DNA:
A casual observer might assume Chihuahuas are descended from angry electric toothbrushes. The breed’s characteristic quivering has historically been chalked up to garden-variety neurosis or a low tolerance for chilly drafts.
But a new study published in the journal Nature Communications suggests a more poetic explanation: Tucked inside that 4-pound frame is a microscopic shard of a coyote, trying to break free.
Researchers at Stanford University were testing a new software algorithm designed to analyze the genomic ancestry of any species at high resolution. By happy accident, the team discovered that, unlike almost every other dog breed, Chihuahuas carry distinct hints of coyote DNA, most likely embedded long before Europeans set foot in the Americas.
The Chihuahua lineage is believed to wind back to the Techichi, a small, barkless companion animal domesticated by the Toltec civilization around the turn of the first millennium that has since gone extinct. Alexander Ioannidis, a Stanford geneticist who collaborated on the paper, notes that contemporary Chihuahuas still retain roughly a 4-percent slice of their ancestry from these pre-contact pooches.
See Franz Lidz, Tiny Chihuahuas Hold a Big Surprise: A Sliver of Coyote DNA, New York Times, November 5, 2026.