This month’s selected study about Coca-Cola in a cat is: “Endoscopic administration of Coca-Cola for medical management of a wedged intestinal trichobezoar in a cat,” Savanah Wilson, Devin Dobbins, Lukas Kawalilak, and Joseph C Parambeth, The Canadian Veterinary Journal, vol. 64, no. 8, 2023, pp. 747-752.
Sixty years ago, the title of this medical article (the article was published this year, 2023) might have made it seem a companion piece to the children’s book The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss: “Evaluation of a Smartphone-Based Colorimetric Method for Urinalysis Dipstick Readings in Cats,” Vincent Leynaud, Candice Gillet, Rachel Lavoué, Didier […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: A sick experiment —The phrase “what goes up must come down” isn’t obviously relevant to the insides of a cat. The countervailing “what goes down must come up” is, when that cat has swallowed something of dubious […]
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, […]