Why do cats hate water? An expert explains. - "Cats and water just don’t mix—that’s the prevailing narrative. And yet, some cats seem to love water. Just poke around on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or the more specialized subgenre of the platform, #CatTok, and you’re bound to find some water-loving felines enjoying a shower or swim. So what gives?... In many ways, cats haven’t changed much in 10,000 years of domestication. Unlike dogs, our feline companions “haven’t really been selectively bred as much. So their predatory motor pattern is basically still intact,” says Vitale. “A lot of their behavior is going to be very [similar to] their wild ancestor.” That ancestor is the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica). Clocking in between six and 18 pounds, the African wildcat looks pretty much the same as a large, tabby housecat—and like a tabby housecat, this wildcat isn’t into water either. “African wildcats are typically going to be hunting on land and hunting terrestrial animals. So they didn’t really develop a lot of behaviors to be in the water or hunting around water,” says Vitale. They are, and always have been, land animals—specifically arid land animals. African wildcats primarily live in deserts and savannas. When they were first being domesticated some 10,000 years ago, they called the dry plains of the Fertile Crescent, a large swath of the Middle East that stretched from northern Egypt to Iran, home. So it makes sense that their modern descendants aren’t hopping into pools with much gusto. But evolution is only part of the equation. How cats are raised also plays an important role in why some, if not most, of our feline friends are apprehensive about water. “If you think about dogs, a lot of pet owners will take their dog to the beach or their dogs are going to be getting baths more often. So from an early age, dogs are learning about water and hopefully that water isn’t something scary,” says Vitale. “But as cat owners, we don’t really do that.” Most domestic house cats aren’t exposed to water as often as their canine counterparts... To be clear, it’s usually best not to bathe your cat. Most cats self-clean, using their coarse tongues to groom themselves or one another. “Bathing them might cause issues because you’re potentially masking the cat’s scent,” says Vitale, especially if you use a scented shampoo or soap. “Cats feel safe and secure when they can smell themselves. And if you’re masking their scent, that can cause stress and anxiety,” says Vitale. It’s bad news if your furry friend starts associating water with being stripped of their natural scent. There’s also the potential that getting wet may throw off a cat’s balance. For instance, whiskers play a vital role in how cats interpret the world around them. They provide information about their environment and how to navigate it. “It’s very possible getting wet might hinder [whiskers’] ability to pick up on vibrations and sensations,” says Vitale."
Canicule à l'hôpital: à Bordeaux, il achète sa propre clim pour rafraîchir la chambre de son bébé - "À Bordeaux, pour rafraîchir la chambre d'hôpital surchauffée de son enfant en bas âge, un père de famille a acheté lui-même une climatisation alors que les températures dépassent les 30 degrés... Au CHU de Bordeaux, 44°C ont été relevés sur une passerelle vitrée. Au sein du service de pédiatrie, des températures insoutenables ont été relevées dans certaines chambre. Au point de pousser certains parents à investir eux-mêmes:
"Il faisait 37°C dans une chambre, le père a dépensé 400 euros pour une clim' car il n'en pouvait plus de voir son enfant hospitalisé dans ces conditions", assure à RMC Agnès Marquet, représente syndicale SUD du CHU de Bordeaux.
Au CHU de Valence dans la Drôme, une aide-soignante a relevé 33°C tout au long de la journée sur son thermomètre: "C'est aberrant, ce ne sont pas de bonnes conditions de travail mais bon, pas le choix. Du coup on se mouille la tête de temps en temps", raconte-t-elle."
Keywords: air conditioning, Europe, buy their own air conditional, hospital, baby
Moongazer on X - "Imagine still being a democrat in 2026 after you wanted Bernie in 2016 and the DNC rigged it so he’d lose to Hillary who lost to Trump and then in 2020 your party had to brazenly rig the election to put in Joe Biden who didn’t deliver on any campaign promises but did allow tens of millions of illegals into America and then he went senile and your party denied it and hid it from you and then when it became too obvious to cover up they did an overnight coup to install Kamala as the presidential nominee instead of democratically selecting one and then she suffered the most resounding defeat of your lifetime and on the eve of Trump’s inauguration Biden’s signature was copy and pasted on preemptive blanket pardons of undefined crimes for every single person involved in anything that ever happened during his administration and within months of the new admin it was uncovered that everything your party touches is engaged and complicit in incalculable fraud using your tax dollars and you still believe your party and the policies they push for are honestly good for you and your country"
3 more nursing assistants arrested in sex investigation at Iowa care facility - "Three more former employees at a northeast Iowa care facility are accused of having sex with patients... The five are accused of having a sex with patients while working at Prairie View Residential Care Facility in Fayette between 2015 and 2016. The facility cares for patients with chronic mental illness, intellectual disabilities or medical conditions. Officers arrested Paige Johanningmeier, 23, and Megan Penney, 26, in early March. The investigation, which began in February, revealed that other workers at Prairie View had also had inappropriate contact with patients. Officers arrested three other former employees who "had been discharged in the past for unhealthy relationships with patients," according to a release from the sheriff's office. Carolyn Wiedrich, 44, Shelby Sebring, 24 and Jamie Pagel, 32, "had sexual relationships" with patients while working at the facility"
Meme - "About to make a snack"
"Samee what u eating?"
"pizza Not Delivered
how about you?"
"Come over :)"
Myth Busts: The Enduring Legacy of Breast-Shaped Glassware - "It can be a challenge for a person to go through life without seeing Kate Moss's breasts... for those for whom a high-fashion photos and paparazzi snaps don't suffice, for those who literally want to get their mouths on Moss's assets, the London-based Restaurant 34 recently issued a champagne coupe modeled on the left one... it’s Marie Antoinette, teen queen of France from 1774 and 1792, who is the possessor of the pert, perfect breasts most often cited as those from which the wide-mouthed, shallow-bowled champagne coupe takes its inspiration. It’s a good story. When cocktail banter runs its course and you’re searching the room for something to comment on, it’s useful to be able to look down at the glass in your hand and say, “Did you know that the champagne coupe is modeled after Marie Antoinette’s breast?” But, alas, it’s probably not true. “In the case of Marie Antoinette, ninety percent of what you hear about her is hyperbole or is invented,” Marilyn Yalom explained to me. Yalom is a senior scholar at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the author of A History of the Breast, in which she elucidates both the power and prejudice women throughout time have experienced as a result of their chests. “It’s not out of the question that someone at some point may have made a mold of some famous woman’s breasts and then used it for a glass,” she went on, “but I don’t think there’s anything to indicate that Marie Antoinette herself would have lent her breast for a vessel.”... With no formal political role or legislative power in the French government, the young queen took on extracurricular activities to fill her time, some of which indeed involved breasts, perhaps influenced by her avid reading of the works of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, among other things, wrote about the benefits of breastfeeding children in his 1762 education treatise Émile. At her summer palace of Rambouillet, Marie Antoinette played out a milkmaid fantasy at her mock dairy farm, and the story goes that her husband the king commissioned artist Jean-Jacques Lagreneé of Sévres, a legendary French porcelain producer, to create a ceramic bol sein (literally, a “breast bowl”) for the dairy, in the shape of a single, perfect breast. But no evidence exists to support the notion that the queen’s interests led her to offer her own anatomy as the model for a glass. Nor is there any proof to back up any of the many variations on the Marie Antoinette tale. The champagne coupe was not modeled after the breasts of Helen of Troy; nor those of Joséphine de Beauharnais, wife of Napoleon; nor those of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II; nor Madame de Pompadour, chief mistress of Louis XV; nor Madame du Barry, another of Louis XV’s mistresses. It is true that Claudia Schiffer loaned a stylized outline of her left breast to a Karl Lagerfeld-designed ceramic coupe for Dom Perignon in 2008 (which, in its design, harkens back to Marie Antoinette’s own bol sein), and that our hero Kate Moss did the same for a crystal coupe, but those supermodels were inspired by mythology, tittles of historical apocrypha. The women the champagne coupe origin stories are ascribed to are themselves tied together with certain common threads. They all were lovers of powerful men, and primarily defined by those associations. Portraits show their breasts as uniformly small, round, and lily-white; their intricate corsetry and aristocratic toilette likely kept their décolletage supple and firm, looking ornamental and smelling sweet... I found a willing mold-maker and glassblower, and had a wine glass cast from my own left breast. By no fault of anyone involved—certainly not the deft hands of the expert mold maker, or the glassblower’s meticulous technique—the glass did not come out looking anything like Marie Antoinette’s breast, or my own breast, or even a coupe. The crystalline, ridged, lopsided impression of my breast sitting atop an elegant stem more resembled an ancient, melting glacier than it did the result of a vanity project to immortalize my youthful assets, an outcome which was, in the end, fine by me. It wasn’t supposed to be a glass, it was supposed to be a way to prove a point."
Amateur sleuth Sholto David is demolishing the science establishment’s dangerous groupthink - " Sholto David is a Newcastle University graduate who has made a name for himself as a “scientific sleuth”. Last year, he brought a case against the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that resulted in a $15m (£11m) settlement of fraud allegations with the US department of justice. Now he has found an astonishingly amateurish error in cancer studies across the world. The implications for public trust in science of this and other scandals are increasingly alarming. In hundreds of studies that David looked at, scientists claimed to have found an effect on a tumour-suppressing gene called p16-INK4a, but had instead ordered the wrong antibody from commercial suppliers. They had bought an antibody that detects the activity of a different and irrelevant gene called p16-ARC, probably because it’s listed alphabetically first in the online catalogue. As a result, teams of scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and even Wuhan have published results – often in high-impact journals – that make no sense. Yet the experts involved often claimed to have validated their hypotheses anyway. As David put it: “What are we to make of cases like this where the wrong antibody was used but the authors still manage to rustle up interpretable results?” He blames “a mixture of outright fabrication, selective reporting, writing errors, and some teams blindly publishing contradictory findings without further questioning or curiosity”. Science is humanity’s greatest triumph, but its reputation is increasingly tarnished after a series of such scandals. In 2023, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford University, resigned after an investigation found “manipulation” of research data in studies he had overseen on Alzheimer’s disease. Earlier this year, it emerged that studies purporting to show microplastics in human organs were fatally flawed after mistaking natural body substances in fat for plastics. Motivated reasoning – the desire to obtain positive results to support sensational headlines or lucrative rewards – had led scientists to celebrate “false positive” data and make people unduly anxious. Scarcely less shocking, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has finally laid to rest one extreme model of future carbon dioxide emissions, called RCP8.5. It never represented a realistic possible future, as the authors made clear 20 years ago. But tens of thousands of studies used this model. It generated scary headlines, influenced unrealistic policies and was used to justify financially lucrative insurance premiums. Britain’s Met Office still uses RCP8.5 to predict what the climate will be like here in the 2070s. The Environment Agency predicts future river flows for flood prevention purposes based on RCP8.5 alone, even though it knows this is bonkers. Examine almost any scary headline about future climate change, and you will find RCP8.5 has been used. During the Covid pandemic, scientists told us to “trust the science”, with the enthusiastic backing of the BBC and politicians. The implication was that there was only one correct view on matters such as airborne infection, modelling, lockdowns, school closures, masks and vaccine efficacy in preventing transmission. When that view proved repeatedly to be wrong, trust in science took a hefty battering. Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise with disastrous implications for diseases such as measles. Who gave credence to cranks like Robert Kennedy, I asked scientist friends: you did. Scientists, like all of us, are prone to confirmation bias, where they look for evidence to support their hunches and prejudices rather than to challenge them. What kept them honest in the past was that they relished the chance to challenge each other. Now, with the insistence on “consensus” – another word for groupthink – and a monopoly of funding channels, dogma has been increasingly allowed to stifle debate. It does not help that science reporters, unlike those who tackle politics, the arts or business, often have a culture of deference rather than critique. The self-correction mechanisms of scientific debate are no longer working well. Yet instead of tackling the problem with humility and reformation, the scientific establishment is inclined to lecture the public for our irrationality. Perhaps it should take a look in the mirror."
How ignorant. Doesn't he know that science isn't done by amateurs, but by scientists? Unless he publishes peer reviewed research, he is not credible and should be ignore, then deplatformed for spreading dangerous misinformation and spreading mistrust in science
Misconduct sleuth wins $2.63 million from major cancer institute in $15 million settlement - "David identified problematic images and other data issues in 57 cancer biology papers authored by Dana-Farber scientists, including several senior leaders. Some papers appeared in top journals, including Science. His findings, posted on the blog For Better Science, sparked dozens of corrections and retractions. Noting that the suspect work had been used in National Institutes of Health grant applications, he later filed a suit against Dana-Farber under the federal False Claims Act, which applies to potential fraud involving federal funding. If there is a deal or conviction the whistleblower can receive a portion of any returned money."
Bloggers are not scientists. His blog needs to be unpublished as it's not credible
el gato malo on X - "you're villifying the wrong people and arguing by false equivalence, simon. people still trust science, they just do not trust "science imposed upon them by experts at the point of a gun." no one is saying "airplanes don't fly" or "computers don't compute." they are saying "you lied about climate change, epidemiology, trade offs with products like roundup, GRAS designations, nutrition, race, gender, and 500 other topics>' and many of these criticisms have validity. and in response, the experts blame the questioner and demand deference. and those who refuse to engage on facts rarely have the facts on their side. trust was lost because "the experts" proved not only untrustworthy, but outright dictatorial. they faked evidence and data, made up wild pseudoscientific theories, and vilified sound science, and pushed utter fakery in its place. they censored opposition and claimed "the science was settled" to prevent investigation into their frauds. and they forced the whole world at the expense of lives and trillions of dollars of lost welfare to play along. it was high handed, dishonest, tyranny. have you stopped to consider that they earned this loss of faith? because they did. MIT wrote a literal article about "anti mask twitter" which it vilified by claiming “most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, not an institution.” as though it proved we had somehow turned our backs on science. but we did not. science is and must be a process. it is never an institution. that's dogma, not the methods of bacon. we did not stop trusting science, the experts stopped performing it and were dancing around in the flensed skinsuit of scientific method that they had stripped from the bones that made it valid: dispute, dissent, replication, validation - open and honest discourse. if you want to win back trust, you need to restore open debate and engagement, share methods, means, and data. wailing about "they won't trust us!" and blaming the folks who called out the deviation from sound science is just another arrogant presumption for institutions to dictate doctrine. you want to respect for sceince? start respecting to process of science again."
John Carter on X - "I was trying to warn my colleagues about this like a decade ago. Most people do not have the time or expertise to evaluate every single peer-reviewed study that enters the scientific literature. Therefore they apply simple heuristics. Until recently the rule of thumb was "the guys in lab coats know what they're doing, you should probably trust them." Then the guys in lab coats started abusing that trust in the name of global warming, fighting racism, making money from pharma, and dozens of other social engineering projects and outright scams. It was very obvious to me that this would destroy trust, thus leading to a new heuristic: "the guys in lab coats are probably full of shit, you should be suspicious of everything they say." Which then leads at the extreme end to Moon landing hoax theories, flat Earth, young Earth creationism, and other nonsense. It also leads to less public support for science funding, because why would anyone want to pay for an ideological priesthood that can't produce anything but a replication crisis?"
The death of work perks - "In a high-profile case last year, the American technology company Dell was criticised for on the one hand demanding staff return to the office, while simultaneously ditching what many saw as one of the last vestiges of what makes office life bearable – free hot drinks... “Because many perks – like health insurance – are contractual, they’re harder to remove, and so it’s the ‘smaller’ perks that are easier to cut,” says Charles Cotton, of the CIPD. “But ironically, when these benefits go, people notice them the most,” he adds. “Perks send an important message about a company’s culture. Removing them might save a bit of money, but what’s often not factored-in is the impact on happiness and productivity.” Antoinette Weibel, a human resources professor at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, adds: “Motivation theory suggests people experience loss twice as much as they do gain. Perks shouldn’t be seen as a cost, but as an investment.”... When pay rises are restricted, benefits are historically boosted, to take up the slack. But not only are benefits also being squeezed, worse still are accusations that employers are trying to relabel what little they do offer as “perks”, when actually they are basic legal minimums. Benefits platform Rippl recently analysed nearly 125,000 job adverts and found 46pc of vacancies described a statutory right (such as 20 days’ holiday leave or sick pay), as a benefit. Three employers were proud of their “bean bag chairs”. One even boasted of its “free water”... A forgiving view is that employers are reacting to a common bugbear: low take-up rates of the benefits they do offer, which are routinely under 10pc, and they are clawing back wasted spend. Last year, research from financial firm Isio and YouGov found UK employers spent £15bn a year on employee benefits that do not resonate with workers or get used."
Meme - "From Bolehland community on Reddit"
"In Malaysia,the indian who cannot speak tamil "we call them coconut". The chinese who cannot speak Chinese "we call them banana. Then how about the Malay who cannot speak Malay? What we call them?"
"Singaporean."
Meme - Rock Solid: "The Chinese government's true intention behind creating the Great Firewall is actually to protect the rest of the world from Chinese internet users"
"Translated from Chinese by Google
When your mother was pregnant with you, did she work as a prostitute on the street every day? Did she have semen from hundreds of men pouring into your brain through your nostrils? Now you are living with a brain infection and cerebellum atrophy. You typed these words to me with your deformed fingers. I suggest you stop surfing the Internet in the future. You are so pitiful."
Meme - Ash beneath grate with water pouring in: "It looks like Team Rocket has finally outsmarted us"
Ash: "Help me Pikachu. I don't want to drown"
*Pikachu struggling with grate*
Ash with head pressed to grate: "No, listen Pikachu. I don't want to drown"
*dark house*
*lit up house*
*dark house*
Wylfċen on X - "If I’m killed, please use my death to push for mass deportations and colonialism, even if it’s completely unrelated."
Meme - Derek @sipofkoko: "For those unaware, nations like Botswana allowed rich Westerners to come shoot aging rhinos and elephants for like, $150k a pop and used that money to pay park rangers and build other infrastructure to prevent poaching and conflicts with farmers. It worked.
SPAR (thee/thou) @SPQRx2: "Hunting is conservation. Even trophy hunting."
"BOTSWANA HAS LEGAL, REGULATED ELEPHANT HUNTING
1977: 33,000
2025: 150,000
KENYA BANNED ELEPHANT HUNTING IN 1977
1977: 275,000
2025: 36,000"
Derek @sipofkoko: "A big part of it was also distributing some of these funds to local communities whose crops are often trampled by these animals. These villages started voluntarily protecting large mammals because it now meant more (not less) money for them.
The intuitive policy approach doesn't always work. What feels good doesn't always lead to good outcomes."
Environmentalists care more about moral purity than outcomes
Poll: 55 Percent of Democrats Would Rather Live Outside the U.S. - "A poll in 2025 found a majority of Democrat voters aligned with socialism over capitalism and supported far-left candidates"
We are still told that left wingers don't hate their countries
Happy Cows Make More Nutritious Milk - "Happy CowsDaily infusions with a chemical commonly associated with feelings of happiness were shown to increase calcium levels in the blood of Holstein cows and the milk of Jersey cows that had just given birth. The results, published in the Journal of Endocrinology, could lead to a better understanding of how to improve the health of dairy cows, and keep the milk flowing."
Online porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
From 2024
Here’s Why Our Walking Gets Slower as We Age - "Analyzing movement data from 107 adults aged 26 to 86, aging experts from Australia’s Flinders University discovered some interesting differences in how our ankles work as we age. When taking a step, older people tend to activate ankle muscles in opposition to one another at the same time. Known as “co-contraction,” this stiffens the joint, improving balance, but it comes at the cost of reduced push-off power, shorter strides, and slower walking speeds. Instead of a confident stride, it’s more of a hesitant shuffle."
