This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here’s how they begin: Seeking a soft landing — The elegant structure of a naturally evolved cat’s paw has inspired a new way to protect paratroopers’ legs…. A bit Heath Robinson — The cat’s-paw-pads-for-paratrooper-protection patent reminds Feedback, a little, of a […]
“Did My Cat Just Hit On Me? An Adventure in Pet Translation“, a report in the New York Times on August 29, 2022, by Emily Anthes, tells about new attempts to build computer-based devices that will translate cats’ and dogs’ utterances into human speech. The report does not mention that these devices follow in the footsteps […]
Professor Jean Berko Gleason‘s cat, Foster, was featured as “Cat of the Day” on CNN’s “Reliable Sources”, in connection with Foster’s upcoming role in the 32nd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.
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 […]