People who worship cats (or maybe less fervently, care unusually much about stuff related to cats) inspire other people to try to analyze why and how those people care so very much. J.C.E. Austin made one of the most notable recent attempts to make sense of it all. Details are in her PhD dissertation: ” […]
This drawing by artist Becky Moon celebrates the 2017 Ig Nobel Physics Prize, which was awarded to Marc-Antoine Fardin, for using fluid dynamics to probe the question “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?” He documented that research, in the paper “On the Rheology of Cats,” Marc-Antoine Fardin, Rheology Bulletin, vol. 83, no. 2, […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Comparatively: People who own dogs or cats — Leah Michelle Baines and Jessica Lee Oliva at James Cook University in Australia say they have discovered that people who own dogs tend to be more resilient than those […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Distinguished frogs — It turns out, say Chatmongkon Suwannapoom and Maslin Osathanunkul, that a good way to distinguish one kind of fanged frog from another is to do melting analysis. Their report, “Distinguishing fanged frogs (Limnonectes) species (Amphibia: […]