academic

Exciting news, this paper outlines the first documented sighting of the sand cat (Felis margarita) in Libya, and new sightings of the Saharan striped polecat (Poecilictis libyca) outside of it's known region. The paper then goes into the observation methods, and people involved in collecting the images and tracking these cats.

More images, and a video can be found on a The Guardian aricle called, 'No one believed it': how a YouTube video accidentally proved Libya's sand cat really does exist.

Brandon Rozek provides a quick introduction to discrimination testing used in the food industry. One that caught my attention was tetrad testing:

Tetrad testing is when the participant is given 4 samples and are asked to pair up the equivalent ones. The probability of guessing correctly is equivalent to that of the triangle test [one out of three], but Ennis and Jesionka show that in some cases the Tetrad test requires one third the number of participants as that required by the triangle test. The Institute for Perception released a techincal report arguing for the switch to Tetrad testing in order to reduce costs. There’s even a fun presentation publicly available by Hannah Lemar showing the suitability of the Tetrad test in the brewing industry.

After analysing 408 YouTube videos, researchers have found that cats show a tendency to sleep on their left side with 65% choosing this "leftward sleeping position".

This finding is not only interesting from the perspective that cats show a significant population-level bias for the left side but also fits very well with previous findings on functional specialization in the mammalian right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is dominant for threat processing, and in most species, animals react faster when a predator is approaching from the left side.

As the title suggests, Jeija demonstrates how WiFi signals travel through our surroundings by capturing them through an ESP32 antenna array. The video dives further into the physics behind the signals through WiFi signal captures, visuals and easy to understand explanations.

Discovered via Tom Scott's Newsletter.

So cats do try their best to communicate vocally.

Research shows that, "listeners were able to identify domestic cat meows from two different contexts significantly better than chance, and that experienced listeners were better judges than inexperienced ones." Taking samples from two of three sibling cats showed that rising intonations were related to food and falling intonations with the vet.

Originally posted on Mastodon.