Here’s a 45 minute BBC podcast of it The infinite monkey cage featuring physicist Brian Cox and comedian/actor Robin Ince, joined by others, arguing about the relative merits of cats and d*gs. Here’s the BBC summary.

Brian Cox and Robin Ince sniff and claw their way through the evidence to put an end to the age-old debate about whether cats are better than dogs. They are joined by TV dragon and dog lover Deborah Meaden, comedian and cat companion David Baddiel, evolutionary scientist Ben Garrod and vet Jess French. They learn how the domestication of our four-legged friends by humans has had a profound impact on their physiology, temperament and methods of communication. They debate which species is the most intelligent and skilled and try to answer the most important question of all: which species really loves you?

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By ScienceAlert we have a story and a video about two lion brothers, one with a missing leg, crossing a crocodile and hippo infested river in Uganda. Click the headline to see, and there’s a video below:

Fragments:

A pair of lion brothers have been captured on video making a perilous 1km swim across a predator-infested Ugandan river – a sign of increasing man-made pressures forcing animals to take more risks.

Brothers Jacob and Tibu crossed the Kazinga Canal at night. It is the first visually documented long-distance swim for African lions (Panthera leo), and there were a few false starts involved.

Researchers recorded potential predators possibly chasing the lion duo before successfully reaching the other side. Working with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, the international team tracked their movements using heat-detecting drone cameras.

“Lions are known to occasionally prey on both crocodiles and hippos, but when in the water they themselves become vulnerable,” the researchers write in their published paper.

“Crossing rivers in Africa carries a significant risk of injury, or even death, from encounters with the much larger Nile crocodile or hippopotamus.”

The video (there isn’t much video of the swim, so watch carefully at the end):

They made it! A little more:

“The fact that he and his brother Tibu have managed to survive as long as they have in a national park that has experienced significant human pressure and high poaching rates is an achievement in itself,” Braczkowski added.

The reason for Jacob and Tibu’s adventure? Most likely we will find females to mate with. However, this is less a story of romantic courage, and more a sobering story about a lion population decimated by poaching and the expansion of human activities in Queen Elizabeth National Park.

“Our science has shown that this population has almost halved in just five years,” says Braczkowski.

There is indeed a road bridge that the lions could have used more safely – but conservationists believe the presence of people on and around the bridge, which is currently guarded by the Uganda Peoples’ Defense Force, would have endangered the brothers. to use it.

Instead, researchers observed lions choosing the much riskier, crocodile- and hippo-infested lake channel six times.

. . . “Competition for lionesses in the park is fierce and they lost a battle for female affection in the hours leading up to the swim, so it is likely that the duo made the risky journey to join the females on the other side of the canal come,” says Braczkowski.

The research was published in Ecology & Evolution.

Here is the article: click to read:

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ListVerse provides 10 heartwarming and “scientific” stories about cats, many of which are accompanied by videos. Click below to read it, and I’ll show you some of the videos:

A contraceptive vaccine for feral cats, easier than catching and neutering:

Cats sit in squares:

Exceptional visual perception and brain wiring are why cats like to sit in 2D squares or other shapes, even if those shapes are incomplete (i.e. four cutouts placed apart from each other in the shape of a square).

The fact that these appear to create a closed shape is Kanizsa’s square illusion, which takes advantage of our brain’s tendency to fill in the gaps and see contours that aren’t there. The same thing happens in the cat’s mind, meaning your cat will probably love a flat, incomplete square as much (or almost as much) as he will a fresh, cozy box.

If you have a cat, you may have noticed that it has whiskers on its paws. But what are whiskers for?

Cats don’t just have whiskers on the whiskered part of their bodies. They also have whiskers on the non-whisker portion of their bodies, including the backs of their legs. These are called carpal vibrissae because carpus means pulse, and vibrissae is the fancy Latin scientific word for whiskers, or technically nose hairs.

Like the whiskers around their snouts, these vibrissae aren’t just for tickling you; they are sensory organs used to perceive a cat’s environment. They can detect small movements, such as changes in air pressure and environment, to help cats navigate their world and achieve their excellent feline agility. Using these wrist whiskers, so to speak, cats can sense surfaces and objects, giving them better spatial awareness, environmental orientation, and hunting skills.

And a new cat breed with unusual fur:

The universe released a new cat type in May 2024, recently described by science. This rare, domesticated Finnish cat has a new coat pattern called ‘salmiak’, and it has a sort of cookies-and-cream look. People in Finland started noticing the pattern around 2007, noting that these black and white tuxedos, instead of conventional tuxedos, featured a color gradation, like a pinch of salt and pepper. The ombré effect occurs as the coat lightens from root to tip, from black to white.

To make it official, scientists identified the genetic mechanisms in the journal Animal genetics as “a 95 kb deletion downstream of the KIT gene.” Ah, of course, that makes so much sense! In more understandable terms, a missing piece of DNA leads to the ‘salmiak’ coat type, named after a popular type of Finnish salty licorice. Because Finns love licorice for some reason. But they also like cats, so it balances out

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Lagniappe: Cats in a Japanese cat cafe respond to an earthquake in 2018. I bet they started responding before humans discovered the earthquake, and quickly fled.

h/t Barry, Bill