As anyone who has seen a stick thrown for a dog in the park will know, interspecies play is not that uncommon. But playing with another species via a computerised interface is considerably less prevalent. Strides, if not leaps and bounds towards such interaction have recently been made however . . . Researchers Frank Noz […]
Tag: cats
Be she the scientific scourge of cats?
A November 1 report in the Los Angeles Times reads like an extract from a crime novel: Smithsonian bird researcher is convicted of trying to poison cats A postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoo was found guilty Monday of attempting to poison cats in her northwest Washington neighborhood. Security […]
The physics of skulking and falling cats
Cats may skulk, and cats may fall – but no matter what they do, cats must obey the laws of physics. Scientists have tried repeatedly to figure out how they manage to do it. At the extreme, physicists analysed what happens to a dropped cat. That’s a cat in free-fall, a cat hurtling earthwards with nothing […]
Cats scanned: A collection
The Cat Scan project collects scans of cats. This image (from an entity called f3line) is one of their many: (via metafilter)
Cats’ tongues and Lizards’ feet
Q. Cats’ tongues and Lizards’ feet – what links them? A. Froude mechanisms. * MIT’s Elasticity, Geometry & Statistics lab (EGS) specialises in – ‘Understanding the mechanics of thin objects’. Prompting them (along with colleagues at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Princeton University) to undertake a now-famous 2010 study with the objective of explaining the mechanics […]
Dog and cat perils – the details
Can owning a dog or cat be classed as a dangerous activity? Judy A. Stevens PhD. and colleagues at The Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention, of the US National Center for Injury Prevention and Control have completed their report – Dogs and cats as environmental fall hazards – which is published in the Journal of […]
Study: Domestic cats, when/why they roll
Domestic cats roll. Oh, they roll and roll and roll – not constantly, but often enough that the behaviour eventually caught the attention of scientists. In 1994, Hilary N Feldman of Cambridge University’s Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, did a formal study of the phenomenon. Feldman’s monograph, called Domestic Cats and Passive Submission, appeared in the […]
Mouse Allergens and the Presence of a Cat
Nature’s game of cat and mouse continues, with a newly discovered twist: “Housing and Allergens: A Pooled Analysis of Nine U.S. Studies,” Jonathan Wilson, Sherry L. Dixon, Patrick Breyss David Jacobs, Gary Adamkiewicz, Ginger L. Chew, Dorr Dearborn, James Krieger, Megan Sandel, and Adam Spanie, Environmental Research, vol. 110, no. 2, February 2010, pp. 189–98. […]
Prize-winning dog-washing machine
Lavakan de Aste, the Spanish company that invented a washing machine for cats and dogs, has a promotional video. They also have a promotional brochure. They also have an Ig Nobel Prize, awarded to them in 2002 for inventing this machine.
The Curious Case of the Boyfriend and the Replacement Cat
“A Zoocentric Capgras Syndrome” [article in German], U. Ehrt, Psychiatrische Praxis, vol. 26, no. 1, January 1999, pp. 43–4. The authors, who are at Klinik und Poliklinik fur Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Halle/Saale, Germany, report that: “We present a case of a 23-year-old women who had the delusional belief that her cat had been replaced by […]