Cats
laelaps | December 20, 2008Happy Caturday! Here are a few pictures of the cats that have visited over the past two months. Feel free to suggest captions in the comments;
DublinTodd (white & grey) playing with Charlotte.Spooky (left) and Dublin (right)
zooillogix | December 12, 2008We just became aware of this. Sadly, now you are too.
Selected bits from the KittyWigs.com FAQ:
Question: Is this for real?Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Kitty Wigs are a fun prop to be used to enhance playtime with your feline friends. They're especially fun for photo sessions.
Question: Isn't this cruelty to animals? Actually, no. We see it as a way for you to spend more quality time with your pet. It's an opportunity for you to show your cat something new... Let's hope they learn to go for the jugular.
pink passion and bashful blonde. the latter does not look amused.
electric blue…
awild | December 6, 2008
Macrophotography, as applied to Mingus the Cat.
photo details: Canon 35mm f2.0 lens with a 12mm extension tube, Canon EOS 20D
ISO 400, f/5, 1/100 sec, indirect strobe
laelaps | November 27, 2008more animalsHappy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope you all get to enjoy the holiday, and if you are looking for something to do while you're waiting for the roast dinosaur to make it to the table, check out my latest post about T.H. Huxley and birds at Dinosaur Tracking.
grrlscientist | November 19, 2008tags: cartoon, humor, funny, pets, cats
Image: XKCD.
I am staying with a cat named Jack in Helsinki, and of course, this means I am redicovering something about cats I'd forgotten, but this phenomenon is well-established scientifically, as you can see from the graph above.
laelaps | November 15, 2008BuffyEarlier this fall my wife and I rescued four kittens that had been living in our backyard. There were two orange ones (Owen & Cope), one black one (Vlad), and one grey one (Buffy). Buffy was the last to be caught, and she did not like it one bit. Where the other kittens warmed up quickly, Buffy hissed at us anytime we came near her cage, and this went on for a few weeks.
Eventually, though, she started to purr, even if she became frightened when we tried to pet her. I realized that she had become too territorial about her cage, and I decided to let her have the run of the bathroom.…
gregladen | November 10, 2008 Cute baby lion kittens. When they grow up, they will want to eat you. I'll never forget the first wild lion I ever saw. It was a pitch black night, on the savanna in the Western Rift Valley. I had climbed on top of the hood of the Land Rover, engine off, but headlights on. My plan was to search the horizon for lights indicating the presence of the research camp I was trying to find. Once I was on the hood, I was about to tell my colleague, still in the vehicle, to cut the headlights so I could see better. That's when she walked into view.
She was a fully adult lioness. Eventually,…
laelaps | November 1, 2008
I forgot to put this up yesterday, but better late than never, right? It's Charlotte (the big fat one) and Vlad (the little one) cuddled up as a ball of furry dark matter on the couch.
sporte | October 23, 2008This video from WDSU shows Mr. Green Genes, the transgenic kitty, in the dark and in the light.
There's also an interview with Dr. Betsy Dresser, who very briefly talks about the work at the Audubon Center for Research on Endangered Species.
Other than clips of the cat, and Dr. Dresser, the video mostly shows people taking frozen samples out of liquid nitrogen, but there's an interesting bit towards the end where they show a pipette transferring material into the nucleus of an egg cell. Mr. Green Genes is certainly a cute cat.
You can see more pictures from the Times Picayune: here and…
sporte | October 22, 2008I've heard that all cats are grey in the dark, but I guess that's no longer true in New Orleans. Scientists at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species have made a cloned kitty that glows lime green.
Some of you already know my fascination with glowing fish, fluorescent cats, and cloned puppies. This New Orleans cat is interesting too, partly, because it's the first transgenic cat made in this country, and partly because of the work that ACRES has been doing to try and rescue endangered species.
ACRES has made the headlines before. Dr. C. Earle Pope and Dr. Martha Gomez,…