Yuri Nakahashi, a student at Hosei University, Japan, wrote a thesis about sleeping with a cat night after night in locations chosen by the cat. IT Media News reports that the thesis is called “Creation of new sleep value in search with cats,” and has been or will be published in Information Processing Society of […]
The quest to more often communicate with one’s dog, if one has a dog, takes a big bounce forward with the invention of a tennis-ball-based dog-to-human internet communication system. A new study offers detail on how, and how well, it works: “Forming the Dog Internet: Prototyping a Dog-to-Human Video Call Device,” Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Roosa Piitulainen, […]
Erwin Schroedinger’s playful metaphor about a cat that is simultaneously dead and alive (until the moment someone looks at it) lives on, in kittens, in occasional physics papers. This new paper, for example, deploys both a CAT STATE and a KITTEN STATE: “Photon added cat state: phase space structure and statistics,” Arman, Gargi Tyagi, Prasanta […]
Cat carcasses can create curiosity. A study called “A Case Report of a Botulism Outbreak in Beef Cattle Due to the Contamination of Wheat by a Roaming Cat Carcass: From the Suspicion to the Management of the Outbreak” has been published by a research team in France. An earlier report by a team in Australia, […]
Questions arise in and about the study “Questioning the Effect of a Robotic Cat in the Treatment of Terminal Restlessness,” by Jun Kako, Kohei Kajiwara, Masamitsu Kobayashi, Yasufumi Oosono, and Hiroko Noto, Journal of Palliative Medicine, vol. 23, no. 2, 2020, p. 158. The authors, at Hiroshima University and Kyushu University, Japan, explain: First, it […]
Karen A. Fox and friends developed a new way to test whether—or not—a bobcat has a goodly amount of domestic cat inside it. They (Fox and friends) tell the story in a newly published study: “A Novel Test for Determination of Wild Felid-Domestic Cat Hybridization,” E.S. Chiu, K. Fox, L. Wolfe, and S. Vandewoude, Forensic […]
The first peer-reviewed academic study to investigate and document the internet’s cat-video-proliferation-phenomenon might well [we think] be : ● Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos by Radha O’Meara, in the M/C Journal, Vol. 17, Issue 2, 2014. Since then, the prevalence of scholarly investigations which reference internet cat videos […]
Earthing mats (a.k.a. ElectroStatic Discharge – Safe Mats) are commonplace in the electronics industry, where sensitive components need to be protected against potentially damaging rogue electrostatic discharges (ESDs). Not so common, though, for protecting furry pets in the home. But this may now have changed. Inventors Thomas J. Gaskill (Haddonfield, NJ), and James S. Gatti […]
Scholarly investigations into the origins of the word “Cat” are not yet complete. A new set of possibilities are presented by Dr Ivana Bašić (a Senior Research Associate at the Serbian Institute of Ethnography, SASA) who points out that there may be previously overlooked connections with the Serbian words for cat / litter : “This paper […]
Ian Sample reports, in The Guardian, a new discovery by Ig Nobel Prize winners, about wombat poo shape: Scientists unravel secret of cube-shaped wombat faeces Researchers investigate why excrement emerges in awkward-shaped blocks … “My curiosity got triggered when I realised that cubical feces exist,” said Patricia Yang pictured below], a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering […]