Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
We have three items this week, though Caturday Felids is moribud because of lack of interest. If comments are not in the two figures here, I’m giving up, and for real.
First, we have a short report from Canada of two “adventure cats”, Fitz and Vlad. These are now becoming so common that I think that many cats can, with proper training, can become Adventure Cats.
The adventures of these cats are documented on the Facebook site Fitzcapades, which has 631,000 followers. Here’s a photo of the two cats kayaking taken from the site. And don’t tell me they don’t enjoy it!
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I’ve written many times about how medieval artists were unable to paint or draw cats, although they did pretty good with humans. Frequently they’d put human faces on cats, but they’d always screw them up completely. Cheezburger has a hilarious collection of bizarre medieval cat paintings here, and I’ll post five for your amusement:
Now, for only $40, you can buy 24 figurines of bizarre medieval cats. It would make a perfect present to give an ailurophire, art lover, or connoisseur of the bizzare. If you give it to someone on December 1, they’ll have a weird cat every day until Christmas Eve. Go to the link above or see the Facebook post below (click on it). I’m not sure if the figures are based on real drawings of medieval cats, but who cares?
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And here’s a treat if you like cat-themed entertainment: a whole two hours of a documentary on cats narrated by British actress and presenter Joanna Lumley. There are two parts to this “Catwoman” series, and I’ve watched bits of both. It’s very good and full of information and entertainment. Distributed by ITV studios, it was first made in 2009 but of course is still current, as cats haven’t changed. I’ve put the two parts, each 45 minutes long, in order below:
Part 1 (Lumley goes to Chicago at 2:45 to see our Cat Circus):
This week’s “New Rule” bit on Bill Maher’s Real Time show is about the financial apocalypse that might result from the American national debt now being $40 trillion. And despite that, Trump keeps increasing it, despite his promises to cut it. He also says that he’ll give every American $5,000, which will add another trillion to the debt.
And the Left, as exemplified by the Democratic Socialists of America (but also “progressives”), tells us that in the future the government will pay for everyone’s housing, health insurance, food, daycare, medicine, and transportation. (Maher says the DSA promises will cost the government between $72 trillion and $212 trillion.) On top of this we have a growing rate of unemployment, defined as “people who are looking for work but can’t find it.” Maher’s conclusion about what this assumes: “Money is free (to be given away) and consequences don’t exist.”
And he’s right—we do have a problem. Although the problem will not afflict my generation so much, it will squeeze future generations: raising interest rates, reducing government benefits, increasing inflation, and reducing purchasing power.
The panel guests are Democratic political strategist Jessica Tarlov and conservative political activist Christopher Rufo x
Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats, Saturday, September 19, 2026, with Yom Kippur beginning at sunset tomorrow and lasting 24 hours. It is the Day of Atonement—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. You cannot have any food or water during the entire period, or even brush your teeth (you might ingest water!). And you’re not allowed to touch or kiss your wife/husband, and must sleep in separate beds. You can see the other rules here, though most Jews aren’t that observant and won’t follow them.
It’s also National Gymnastics Day, and in honor of that I present the first perfect 10 score in gymnastics, Romanian Nadia Comǎneci on the uneven bars in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Wikipedia also has a list of “perfect 10 gymnastics” performances for both men and women. Here are the top five performances on the parallel bars in Montreal, with Comǎneci’s performance last, starting at 2:31:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plans to campaign across New York in the weeks before the midterm elections, and she has donated $300,000 to help boost the Democratic ticket in her home state as speculation has swirled over whether she will run for Senate or president in 2028.
In an interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said she would be “traveling across the state to boost turnout in many different areas,” including planned stops in Buffalo, Syracuse and Ithaca in the coming weeks.
“New York,” she said, “has become increasingly relevant to whether we have a majority or not in the House of Representatives.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will donate the funds to a pool of money for Democrats statewide that is being overseen by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is seeking re-election this year. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has earmarked the funds for voter organizing rather than advertising, with a specific proviso that half of the money be devoted to Spanish-language outreach.
“This investment is really not just about throwing money around and putting points on the board,” she said. “This is actually about transforming the way Democrats go about building a coalition.”
Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hochul, said that the statewide effort, known as a coordinated campaign because it helps candidates for various offices, would be “prioritizing communities that are too often overlooked and written off.”
The sum is more symbolic than financially significant in a state as expansive and expensive as New York. It is also more money, though, than any other member of the New York delegation has contributed, according to two people familiar with the donation. Ms. Hochul had asked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for the contribution, which had been under discussion for several weeks.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is one of the Democratic Party’s top fund-raisers nationwide and has raised more than $32 million since the start of 2025. She entered the summer with $15 million in the bank.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, whose district includes parts of the Bronx and Queens, suggested that there should not be much reading of tea leaves into her announcement as she weighs a political future with at least three options: re-election, a New York Senate race or a presidential run in 2028.
“I’ve been pretty open about the fact that I’m going to be weighing this decision, but I’m going to be weighing it after the midterm elections,” she said.
The fact that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez previously clashed with Jay Jacobs, the state party chairman, appears to at least partly explain why she chose to direct the money to the Hochul operation.
I’d be willing to bet that AOC, who has ambitions as big as her record is thin, will run for Senator, given that (I think) her chances to win the Presidency is small. But even as a Senator she’d have more power than she deserves, as she’s accomplished little in the House save promote herself. Yes, she’s good at that, and she’s a Democratic Socialist, so the kids like her, but as a politician, she’s a disaster for someone of my stripe.
*Reader Peter N. called my attention to a piece on slime molds in the Guardian, a piece that makes you question the notion of intelligence, and whether it can be seen in amoeba-like organisms that have no neurons: “‘This is dangerous: slime molds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence.” Because I’ll give a few quotes at length, I am giving only four news sources today.
Forty years ago, as an undergraduate in Hokkaido, Toshiyuki Nakagaki came upon a lemon-yellow stain in a petri dish. That encounter turned him into a doyen of slime mould research – and fed a storm of biological and philosophical debate about the meanings of life and intelligence that persists to this day. Before, no one would have called a slime mould “intelligent”; the popular adjective, in fact, was “simple”. “A simple mass of protoplasm,” one 1895 description ran; “among the most simple of organisms”, said another. And it was hard to argue otherwise. A slime mould can appear to be just a small cell, capable only of feeding and reproducing. Simple is as simple does.
Of that first meeting, Nakagaki said: “I was just impressed with how fast it moved.” Physarum polycephalum, the slime mould species in that petri dish, has a top speed of 1cm an hour. For amoebic organisms, that’s gold-medal standard. At first glance, Physarum seems to spread as irregularly as ink on blotting paper, but in fact it senses its meals of bacteria or other microbes and reaches for them with a long, thin finger of protoplasm – which not only digests its food but then forages further or pulls back into the rest of the mould. It’s impossible to watch a slime mould over many days without sensing some deliberation at play.
. . . .In 2000, his astonishing research began to surface in the media. “Slime mould solves maze puzzle,” one headline ran, summarising an experiment in which Nakagaki induced a Physarum to find the shortest route through a maze in search of food. (In labs, slime moulds are reared on oat flakes, a convenient diet that can double as a researcher’s breakfast.) In 2010, the New York Times wrote about Nakagaki’s most famous experiment – the canonical study that scientists offhandedly call “the Tokyo railway one”. Nakagaki placed oat flakes to resemble the map of Tokyo and 35 of its satellite towns. Then he let the Physarum loose from the centre of “Tokyo”. From that one metropolitan oat, the mould spread outwards seeking the others, stretching towards them with its tubules. Then, putting out more branches, it linked up with itself, from one suburban oat flake to the next.
In doing all this, the mould displayed such a verve for efficiency – no wasted motion, an optimal pursuit of its food – that it ended up nearly retracing the route map of the greater Tokyo area’s railway system. Nearly, Nakagaki said – because, in fact, free of human bias or politicking, Physarum may have improved the design of the network. Later, when Nakagaki twice won the Ig Nobel – the prize for research that is both amusing and thought-provoking – the first award cited his maze paper in the field of “cognitive science”, but the second, cheekily, hailed the Tokyo railway study as a breakthrough in “transportation planning”.
. . . For more than a century, scientists were sure that cognition and intelligence required neurons, the cells that make up brains and nervous systems. These neurons form and reform connections between themselves to create pathways for thought and memory. This understanding of intelligence was an implicit argument that animals occupy a special place within the living kingdom – separate to plants and microbes – and that humans are most special of all.
But since the 1980s, more and more scientists have argued that traits such as cognition are intrinsic not just to animals but to all life – a stance that Pamela Lyon, a philosopher at Adelaide University, calls “biogenic”.
. . . . Given that the mould has no brain, slime is evolution’s way of “storing” memories of spaces. One of Reid’s experiments suggests Physarum uses its slime as an aide-memoire to recognise the paths it has travelled and those it hasn’t. The yellow slime, sticky but more watery than human mucus, is a soup of sugars and proteins. Its presence, Reid believes, tells a mould that it has already foraged in these parts and consumed any food there was to be had. When Reid’s team harvested slime from a mould, coated one route in a maze with it, and introduced the mould into this set-up, it nearly always chose to traverse the dry, un-slimed areas. More impressively, the Physarumcan distinguish between its own slime and that discharged by of other species – as if Hansel could tell his breadcrumb trail apart from Gretel’s.
Over the past three decades, as the study of intelligence has broadened beyond humans, slime-mould research has gathered speed. We know now that Physarum is made up of thousands of tiny oscillators that sense their environment. If they pick up the chemical markers of a meal, these units oscillate faster, in turn causing the cell’s protoplasm to flow more thickly towards that area. This is how the mould moves.
But how these oscillators, so minuscule and seemingly so rudimentary, manage to sense so much – proteins, salts, acidity, light, heat, humidity, perhaps even gravitational and magnetic fields, and masses looming at a distance – is still unclear. In 2008, Nakagaki and his colleagues subjected a Physarum to cold, dry air streamed at regular hourly intervals, prompting it to slow its locomotion. After three such gusts, the mould spontaneously slowed on the top of the fourth hour – even when the mistral didn’t blow. No one can figure out how the slime mould keeps time.
. . .The truths are rooted in semantics. Unlike, say, the word “haemoglobin”, terms such as “cognition” have been around for so long that they’ve been coded into colloquial use in phrases such as “cognitive decline” and “cognitive bias”. To freely stretch the word beyond its wider connotation of the workings of a brain – to apply it to brainless beings such as slime moulds – “misleads the public”, Alex Kacelnik, a zoologist at the University of Oxford told me. “It hollows out the word itself.”
Kacelnik, who has studied the New Caledonian crow’s nimble use of tools, pointed out that “even an oak tree ‘decides’ – in inverted commas – how many acorns it will produce, what size each acorn is going to be, and when it will shed them. But when people say they’re going to cognitive therapy, they mean something different from what the oak is doing, right?” Misusing the word, he said, is counterproductive. By likening the tree’s function to cognition, “you haven’t solved the problem of how the oak does what it does – you’ve just trivialised it, or defined it out of existence”. He uses the term “cognition” in his own writing only when he can show that it involves “some kind of internal algorithm, with some kind of concept formation, in some kind of ‘language’ – in inverted commas”.
IU agree with Kacelnik in that we’re projecting when we ascribe “intelligence” to a creature like a slime mold, regardless of how highly evolved it is to do cool stuff. It doesn’t use neurons, but chemical cues, and to ascribe “cognition” to it—something I think is key to “intelligence”—is misguided. In fact, to argue whether it is “intelligent” or not seems to me the wrong path to take. What we can do is marvel at, and figure out, how this protist can do all this stuff, and even do experiments to see how it evolved. Even tiny organisms like these are the products of millions of years of evolution, and can show adaptations that boggle the mind (think of all the amazing things ants do with a brain the size of a dot made by a pencil).
There’s a lot more to this article, and a lot of word-parsing and philosophizing. In the end, I think the problem is semantic, but I’d prefer to think of “intelligence” as requiring cognition—an ability to reason.
Here’s ZeFrank’s segment on slime molds:
*The NYT reports that the new Merriam-Webster dictionary is “Wordsmaxxing with 1400 new definitions” (article archived here). As you know, you have to be au courant with language, so here are some new words:
Merriam-Webster, the venerable dictionary that traces its roots to a time before looksmaxxing and yacht rock, has added those words along with chili crisp, shapewear and cuffing season, to its comprehensive accounting of the English language.
The company, based in Springfield, Mass., announced on Tuesday that it had added those five terms and 1,395 other new definitions to its online dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com. Many will also be added to upcoming editions of the print dictionary.
Merriam-Webster is the oldest dictionary publisher in America. It traces its start to 1843, when the brothers George and Charles Merriam bought the rights to the 1841 edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary. The company emphasizes that the dictionary is not a static catalog, but a reflection of the many different ways words are used by real people.
That includes food-related words that have become more commonly used in the United States like superfood, “a food (such as salmon, broccoli, or blueberries) that is rich in nutrients,” and shishito, “a slender usually mild chili pepper of East Asia.” On the sweeter side, the dictionary added cake pop, “a compressed ball of cake crumbs and icing that is dipped in a usually chocolate or sugary coating,” for the uninitiated.
Anyone who dreads going to work or school might be familiar with the Sunday scaries, the “feelings of anxiety or sadness that arise on Sunday from the knowledge that the weekend is almost over.” And people who know Braden Peters, the proudly vain social media influencer known as Clavicular, might be familiar, for better or worse, with looksmaxxing. Merriam-Webster calls it “the practice of taking one or more sometimes extreme or dangerous measures intended to increase one’s physical attractiveness.”
Yes, we discussed that odious word last week. But wait! There’s more!
. . . .Fans of Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald might be pleased to see that yacht rock made the cut. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a style of soft rock music originating in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Also clearing the bar was cuffing season, “a time of the year when people who are not married or in a relationship begin looking for a short-term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with.”
Merriam-Webster also added parasocial, “a one-sided emotional connection with someone (especially a celebrity or fictional character) whom one does not know personally,” and Rickroll, “to trick (someone) into hearing the song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by English singer Rick Astley.”
The only one I know of these, save “looksmaxxing”, is Rickroll, and I like that one.
*As always, I’m stealing a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column at The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Experts fear worse ahead.”
→ Ed Sheeran debacle: Ed Sheeran decided to have Macklemore as his tour opening act, and the rapper took the stage to give a “Free Palestine” speech, like he was kicking off a course at Columbia or something. In the long debate about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, Macklemore leaves little doubt, in that he once performed wearing a fake beard and an oversized prosthetic nose in what was widely seen as a Jewish caricature. Anyway, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft then pressured Ed Sheeran’s promoters to drop Macklemore, and Macklemore was dropped. You can imagine what happened next. Macklemore has become even more of a hero, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers, bringing more attention to the cause. All of Ed Sheeran’s other opening acts backed out of the tour, as did his own backing band. For a sense of the public tone, comedian Mike Recine posted: “Robert Kraft is a pedophile and someone should kill him.” So it’s all going really well, temperature’s nice and low out here. Recine deleted his initial, um, joke? and posted: “Hey everyone I’d like to apologize for the post I made last night when I said ’Children deserve to have legs.’ I didn’t realize that statement was offensive to the Jewish community and I will choose my words better moving forward.”
The idea here being, I guess, that Jews love to kill children, or at least blast their legs off, so telling people to assassinate Robert Kraft is the same as saying you want to save children. So, by extension, then, being pro–Robert Kraft’s life equals wanting to remove Palestinian children’s legs.
All the former pro–cancel culture people are suddenly screaming “free speech,” which is always just so funny, and they point out the same hypocrisy in the anti–cancel culture people, who are suddenly saying deplatforming is a private company’s decision. Fair critique of both sides. But it’s all word games. The fact is, antisemitism is popular right now, and the Bob Krafts of the world cannot win. You either host the man who hates you and wants you in a work camp—or you make him even more of a star. Those are your options, Bob. Choose wisely, and if I were you, I’d probably stay away from your own venue for fear of the mobs.
→ Quote of the week: Here’s the latest scandal from Hasan Piker, the top political influencer on the left and a frequent campaign buddy for Dems.
Because I’m in the United States of America, the most dogshit country on the fucking planet, the absolute worst country on the planet, straight up, bar none. A capitalist shithole. The absolute worst fuckin’ place on the planet, just a horrific, monstrous, awful, dogshit country that I fucking despise. The absolute fuckin’ worst country that has the most—the most—wealth throughout history, throughout time, the wealthiest nation on the planet, and we don’t have a fraction of the dedicated broadband speed that you can get in a fucking village on the countryside of France. Okay? I just—the worst fucking infrastructure, the absolute biggest shithole on the planet, I fucking despise this nation. I despise this country with my entire fuckin’ heart. Okay?”
Okay! That’s right, while livestreaming from his gorgeous West Hollywood home, the Wi-Fi got a little wobbly, and so Hasan went nuclear. America is his mom, and she’s being a total bitch. This is what young people love shooting directly into their veins. “Dogshit country that I fucking despise.” Get this guy a swear jar and he might end up as poor as the people he pretends to advocate for!
In late-breaking news, Piker also sat down with Alex Thompson of Axios: “Do you think America then is worse than al-Qaeda?” Piker: “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes.” Perfect.
→ Testing, testing: New York State’s Regents exams are three-hour tests on subjects like English, math, and science. Students need a score of 65 on multiple exams to pass and get a high school diploma. But now New York’s planning on dropping the requirement. Here’s New York Board of Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams on the change: “Maybe you’ve seen the cartoon where you have a fish climb a tree? You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees.” If the Regents exam asked students to breathe underwater, then Felicia’s argument might track. But the exam asks students to read, write, and solve math problems—skills that are standard for most educated human beings. Or should be? Of course this test was dropped as a requirement for vaguely anti-racist reasons that no one bothered to really explain. But now: What will New York high school students have to prove in order to graduate? Will they just fill out a feelings wheel? Are they going to play Go Fish for 40 minutes and call it a day? That’s insane for the public school system. Playing games at school costs at least $50,000 at a private school in Santa Monica.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being bribed with beef:
Hili: Sometimes even a cat has had enough of everything.
Andrzej: Do you want a piece of beef?
Hili: That’s psychological manipulation.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, often called the “Prince of Mathematicians,” famously described mathematics as the “queen of the sciences” and number theory as the “queen of mathematics.”
I think prime numbers are the oxygen of number theory. They are the fundamental building blocks of… pic.twitter.com/F0WLsEyaMS
Tw0 from my feed. I think the Democrats are finally realizing that Hasan Piker is a liability. What a dumb party we are! Here’s Rahm Emanuel:
Now that he won’t stop talking, the folks who told us Hasan Piker is a serious voice who should be listened to ought to let us know which of these positions we’re supposed to take seriously:
1. That “pound for pound,” America is worse than al-Qaeda – a ridiculous statement on a…
And one from Herr Dr. Professor Cobb, which he calls, “Nearly a caracal”:
It's amazing that perhaps the world's best place to see an awesome wild cat – the caracal – is right on the edge of a big city. Climbed #TableMountain today from #CapeTown with a tiny hope of seeing one, & was delighted to find some poo. Half the joy of #MammalWatching is just knowing they're there
It’s Friday and thus music time, and here’s one of my favorite songs from the Eighties: “Don’t Get Me Wrong” with the Pretenders. Wikipedia tells us that it’s the only original Pretenders song—something new to me—and adds this surprising fact:
McEnroe apparently played something on one of her albums. At any rate, the song is from 1986 and rose to only #10 on the American charts. With its driving beat, great bridge, and lovely vocals (Hynde’s pronunciation of “Fantastic” at the end always gets me), it deserved more than that. Here’s a live performance, or so I think (it’s very close to the recorded version); the notes say it was on Top Of The Pops on 23rd October, 1986:
According to Wikipedia, there are 41 living species species belonging to 14 genera in the family Felidae (the “cat family”). One genus, Leopardus, includes (or included) eight species of small cats, among them the ocelot and Geoffroy’s cat. But now the genus has three more species—two subspecies were elevated to species rank and, excitingly, a brand-new species, L. tilcayo, was just discovered in Bolivia and described in the Current Biology paper below (click the headline to read):
No, they didn’t find a new subspecies, which is often what these announcements say, but they found a new full species of cat, at least as far as I, “Mr. Speciation,” can judge. Ergo, there are now 43 species of cats. If you know your cats, try writing down as many species as you know. It’s a good party game (LOL), but I bet you can’t get even half of them.
First, credit to the scientists. Click to read the Current Biology article, which is woefully bereft of photos (but I’ve added some below):
From the paper:
Etymology
This species is named after the local name “tilcayo” used for this felid, which is widely known in the Bolivian Yungas zone. The name is treated as an unchanged noun in apposition.
Vernacular name
We propose “tilcayo” as the English common name, preserving the traditional local designation in recognition of its cultural and regional relevance.
Diagnosis
Leopardus tilcayo differs from L. pardinoides by its shorter pelage, lower contrast pattern, more expanded and irregular open rosettes, less bushy tail, and the absence of broad and complete caudal bands (see Data S1). It differs from L. tigrinus by its larger and more irregular flank markings, longer and fuller tail, and irregular caudal blotches. It differs from L. guttulus by its larger, more heterogeneous markings, lower dorsal contrast, and relatively longer tail. L. tilcayo can be distinguished from other Leopardus taxa by a large number of molecular characters. In the nuclear genome, among the 29,288,951 transversion variants, on average 1,392,646 sites differentiate L. tilcayo from L. t. antisuyo and 1,491,301 sites differentiate L. tilcayo from L. pardinoides. For simplicity we provide a list of diagnostic mitochondrial DNA sites (see Data S1).
Description
L. tilcayo is a small felid with a head-body length of 425–505 mm and a tail length of 250–265 mm. It has a light brown dorsum, darker along the mid-dorsal ridge and paler toward the limbs. The pelage is characterized by relatively large, irregular, dark brown to black rosettes, mostly open or partially closed, on a light brown to beige background. The rosettes do not coalesce. A detailed description is provided in Data S1.
In light of the fact that the tilcayo seems to abut the distribution of L. tigrinus antisuyo, but maintains significant morphological and genetic differences from it, I think the designation of the tilcayo as a new and full biological species is valid.
Below from the paper is a map of the species range compared to that of other conspecific species, a skull of the oncilla L. tigrinus tigrinus, and, in (C), a photo of the new cat, which was captured alive, and, according to the paper, released in healthy condition.
The authors also elevated two known taxa to species rank, L. emiliae and L. pardinoides. As you see, the three new species were formerly lumped as L. tigrinus (figure A below shows only one group elevated to species rank, which is discrepant with the other phylogeny in the paper, showing two species elevated plus the newly discovered L. tilcayo).
The closest relative of the tilcayo is, according to molecular analysis, the trio of L. trigrinus tigrinus and its sister L. tigrinusantisuyo (subspecies of the oncilla), as well as their sister species, L. pardinoides, the clouded tiger cat. Notice that the species distribution forms a ring around the Amazonian rainforest. This is not, I think, a “ring species.”
(From the paper): (A) Sample localities of individuals from the tiger cat species complex analyzed in this study. Localities of other Leopardus samples are shown in Figure S1. Colors highlight the main ecoregions inhabited by each putative clade of tiger cats.8 Ecoregions were drawn from the Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World.16 Orange-teal color banding and gray shading indicate regions of uncertain distribution. “Former L. tigrinus” refers to a widely accepted taxonomic treatment of tiger cats before the current revision.10 (B) Left side of the skull of specimen USNM 395090 (L. tigrinus tigrinus) from Guyana, after we collected fragments of petrous bone through the left auditory meatus for DNA extraction and genome sequencing. Photo credit: J.L. (C) Live specimen of L. tilcayo (sample ID: L. tilcayo BOl-2, voucher ID: MNHN-L2), a newly described tiger cat species from the Bolivian Yungas. Photo credit: P.N.-A.
Pictures are few and far between, but here’s a tweet and a video showing more about this small (three-pound) cat:
BREAKING NEWS: New cat species just dropped! 🧪What is a tilcayo, exactly? Well, it's a small wild cat in the genus Leopardus and a member of the tiger cat species complex, but it is NOT a tigrina, oncilla, kodkod, Geoffroy's cat… http://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti…
Here is the publicity in popular media. Click to read each article. I’ll quote from only the National Geographic article.
From National Geographic. This is the best source because, if you click on the link, you’ll start off with a video of the new species:
A quote:
In 2016, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a biologist and National Geographic Explorer working in Bolivia, received a call from a local wildlife sanctuary that had just been given what they described as “a weird cat.” It came from a local man who found it as a kitten on a road near a forest. The man took the animal home, believing it to be a domestic breed. But after about a year of living with the clearly wild animal, he realized it would be better off at a sanctuary.
As the lead scientist and founder of the Bolivian Felids Research Program (Programa de Investigación de Félidos Bolivia), Nogales-Ascarrunz was intrigued. The animal had a small, scrunched-up face, short and round ears, and long whiskers. It was, indeed, too small to be a housecat, and, most notably, it was covered in leopard-like spots. So she went to visit the creature at the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary on the subtropical flank of the Bolivian Andes.
“I took a hundred pictures of it,” remembers Nogales-Ascarrunz. “I was so fascinated.”
What she couldn’t know at the time was that this curious cat had a secret. It would become the first new species of felid (i.e. the cat family) discovered in over 100 years, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology. What’s exciting is the discovery is not a validation of a species proposed in the distant past, nor a previously recognized subspecies raised to species status—which are both more commonly reported and important findings. No, this cat was something totally new to science.
At the time though, Nogales-Ascarrunz assumed the unusual cat was a member of the species Leopardus tigrinus. Sometimes called tigrinas, oncillas, tigrillos, or little spotted cats, this species was described back in 1775 from a single illustration of an animal seen in French Guiana and was subsequently presumed to exist across Central and South America, including, at the time, Bolivia.
. . .It would take another few years before Nogales-Ascarrunz developed her skills in genetic analysis to the point where she could investigate the mystery cat’s genome with any accuracy. Then, working with Eduardo Eizirik, a geneticist at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and study co-lead author Jonas Lescroart from the University of Antwerp, the team was able to find its distinct place on the cat family tree.
In their paper, the researchers propose the cat should be known as Leopardus tilcayo, in honor of the word local people know it by. “We asked the local people, ‘Why do you call it tilcayo?’” says Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is herself from Bolivia. “And they said, ‘I don’t know! My grandpa called it tilcayo, so I call it tilcayo.” (The name does not appear to mean anything particular in Spanish or the Quechua language spoken in Bolivia.)
So far, all scientists can say is that L. tilcayo lives in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion, which lies on the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains. But as to what these cats eat or get eaten by, how they reproduce, and many other facets of their day-to-day lives, much mystery remains. “So many basic things are not known,” says Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is co-lead author of the new study.
But the discovery is monumental, and not just because it’s the first new cat discovered since the pampas cat in 1923. The new paper doesn’t just name a new species; it redraws the cat family tree to have a lot more branches than previously thought. What’s more, the researchers hope the methods used to identify L.tilcayo may soon be used to find even more cat species spread across the world, and even transform how we protect them.
From Reuters:
From the BBC:
By the way, there are a paltry 37 species of wild d*gs in the family Canidae, and the morphology of wild cats, as I said in my New Yorker “Cats vs. Dogs” talk, is far more diverse than of wild dogs. That shows that, at least in nature, there is no lack of genetic variation in cats. Why, then, are domestic dogs so much more variable in size, shape, and behavior than domestic cats? My hypothesis, which is mine, is that wild dogs are almost always social animals, while wild cats, with the exception of lions, are almost always nonsocial. To me this means that the behavior of canids is more malleable than is the behavior of cats, which in turn means that the gray wolf (a social wild canid) had the genetic variation to be bred by humans into different breeds doing different things. Cats, I think, don’t have that kind of genetic variation, and they remain solitary and (largely) untrainable. Remember that many dog breeds were artificially selected to do different jobs, explaining their greater diversity of morphology, size, and behavior than what we see in domestic cats.
h/t: to the many readers who sent me links to announcements of the new cat.
Welcome to Friday, September 18, 2026, and National Ice Cream Cone Day. There are two types of people: cone people and cup people. I like to eat the cone, though sometimes it gets drippy, but I’ll take the cup if a place gives you more ice cream in a cup. The history of the cone as a container for ice cream is murky. Wikipedia says this:
The earliest certain evidence of ice cream cones come from Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Book of Cookery (1888), written by the English cook Agnes B. Marshall.]Her recipe for “Cornet with Cream” said that “the cornets were made with almonds and baked in the oven, not pressed between irons”. Marshall is consequently often regarded to have been the inventor of the modern ice cream cone.
Iran vowed to respond to a U.S. blockade by pushing more trade overland. On the ground, it isn’t going according to plan.
Hundreds of Iranian truck drivers are currently stuck at Iran’s border with Pakistan, unable to send their goods into Tehran’s neighbor. They say they are facing worsening bureaucratic hurdles and costs, many caused by their own government. The same thing is happening at Iran’s land borders with Turkey, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, dealing Tehran a self-inflicted blow and throttling trade through its few remaining economic release valves.
Tons of stranded apricots have been spoiled because of the delays. Lucrative cargoes of iron ore, cement and bottled gas are stuck at entry points to the Pakistani and Afghan borders, truckers say.
“Neither Iran is taking responsibility for the situation, nor is Pakistan allowing us to unload our cargo,” one driver says in a video posted by the Union of Truckers and Drivers Organizations Across Iran over the weekend.
The economic war in the Persian Gulf is dictated as much by how much the countries in the region can move their exports over land rather than through the Strait of Hormuz. Some have found workarounds. Saudi Arabia is moving more of its oil west across the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. Navy is helping some of the Gulf nations shift their oil through the strait.
Iran’s attempts are faltering. The U.S. is isolating its economy with new sanctions and launching strikes on Iranian tankers in reprisal for Tehran’s attacks on its Navy, collapsing seaborne exports.
In another setback for Iran’s plans to bypass Hormuz, the country’s Mahan Air, which is sanctioned by the U.S., said Wednesday that it was suspending flights to Oman and Turkey, state-affiliated media in Tehran said. Last week, the U.S. Treasury imposed new sanctions on companies it said were supporting Mahan, which operates cargo and passenger services.
The U.S. blockade has also hurt Iran’s imports of basic goods, 70% of which normally go through the blockaded ports. Though humanitarian goods and food are ostensibly exempt, the reality is that shippers are reluctant to service Iran.
Videos posted on social media last week show cranes at the Port of Shahid Rajaee, Iran’s largest commercial container port, at a standstill. Thousands of containers are stranded in ports in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, transportation professionals in Tehran last month told the Mehr News Agency, which is affiliated with Iranian security services.
Even Iraq is blockading Iranian goods:
But in a sign of how vulnerable the alternative routes are, Iraq over the weekend temporarily closed cargo terminals at the Iran border after alleging Iran had used its territory to attack Saudi Arabia. On Sunday, trucks carrying Iranian onions bound for Iraq were forced to turn back as a result, according to Tehran’s Central Fruit and Vegetable Market.
The rising costs are now adding to Iran’s worsening inflation problem.
. . . Much of these costs are being passed on to consumers, with unpredictable results for the Iranian leadership. Food inflation rose to 128% in August, according to Iran’s official statistics office.
Is it too much to hope for the people to rise up and depose the government? Yes, I suppose it is, but this article is heartening news despite a drumbeat of bad news proclaimed by the NYT, Washington Post, and other “progressive” media that are hoping that the U.S. loses the war.
*I said I’d report back on reactions to the new anti-Israel movie “NAZA,” which accuses of Israel of deliberately killing civilians in a way not according to their strategy (“the military gains must outweight the civilian losses”, or something like that). There’s one in the Free Press by their Middle East analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, “Hold your applause for the new Gaza documentary“, with the subtitle “There may yet be hard truths in ‘NAZA,’ including evidence of Israel’s systemic failures. But the reporting around it treats flimsy claims as proof of criminality.” (Note: like nearly everyone weighing in, Gur hasn’t seen the movie).
The title is an Israeli military acronym derived from nezek agavi, Hebrew for collateral damage. It refers to the filmmakers’ conviction that the systems Israel used to select targets and authorize strikes in Gaza enabled immoral and unlawfully high rates of civilian casualties. Their allegation goes beyond excessive tolerance of civilian casualties: They reportedly contend that the killing was intentional.
I haven’t seen the film. This means I cannot confidently assess its editing, corroboration, or the full testimony it presents. I would love to live in a world in which I could wait, watch the movie, and have a sober debate about its claims. Unfortunately, the discourse online is not so patient. That’s why it’s necessary to examine the argument its makers have published, the reporting on which it builds, and the standards by which its allegations should be judged. The film falls short on every dimension.
Start with the question of civilian casualties. The online conversation about the film—as distinct from the film’s own claims—is replete with shock and horror at the finding that the IDF calculated the estimated number of civilian deaths before each strike. According to the usual Israel critics, this shows that the resulting deaths amounted to deliberate murder.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how clownishly (and intentionally) wrong this claim is. International humanitarian law requires those planning an attack to assess foreseeable civilian harm and take feasible precautions to avoid or minimize it. You can’t assess proportionality in relation to the expected military advantage of a strike—as required by law—without that calculation. Indeed, an attack that isn’t preceded by an assessment of potential civilian deaths is an immoral attack. This point isn’t against the film itself, but it says something important about how skewed and shallow and preordained the debate around it was always going to be.
So what does the film itself claim? In their published accounts, the filmmakers describe interviews with 24 former IDF soldiers, most of them intelligence officers. They claim that civilian losses were authorized for targets of little military value, and that in some cases, the intended target was not present. According to the soldiers, these were features of the system, not departures from its protocols.
Those are substantive claims. But I have seen nothing to suggest that they are proven in the film itself. What I do know is that neither the filmmakers nor their production or research teams presented any of the findings to the IDF for a response. In fact, the IDF has publicly asked the filmmakers to screen the documentary for military officials so it can produce a detailed response; so far it’s not clear they have responded.
So, when we Israelis do finally see the film, we will ask the most basic journalistic questions: How are its claims established? What did each witness—all of them anonymous—actually observe, and what was their role and level of access? Does an officer describing one phase of the targeting process know what happened during the rest? Are any of these claims corroborated in any independent way? When someone says a target had little military value, what information is that judgment based on?
Nobody has to prove a system-wide policy for the unjustified killing of a particular individual or family to be wrong, and deserving of an investigation. But the film’s claim isn’t about a single strike, or even a number of them. It is that the IDF’s collateral-damage mitigation system is used to systematically and purposefully target civilians. That this was the purpose of the military campaign.
One of the few Israelis who’s had the chance to watch the film—and who is sympathetic to director Yuval Avraham—came away deeply disappointed. In a Monday op-ed in Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli outlet most likely to resonate with the film’s claims, Raviv Drucker wrote that he couldn’t help but feel the film was trying to create an “impression” of the “context in which these terrible things were done”—juxtaposing military claims about suffering in Gaza with images of people dining in Tel Aviv. He simultaneously vouches for Avraham’s integrity while complaining that the film fails to prove or contextualize its claims. According to Avraham, NAZA doesn’t say anything meaningful about the broader military context (which is necessary to prove that strikes had no military need), compare how other armies fight terrorist organizations embedded in civilian populations, or even acknowledge the problem of Hamas’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure. Drucker’s conclusion is written in a tone of sadness and disappointment, not anger. He wishes, he writes, that the film had been “truer to reality.”
Gur also shows that director Yuval Abraham deliberately distorted the number of Palestinian civilian dead in a previous publication, and that the targeting restrictions changed over the course of the war for military reasons. In the end, Gur doesn’t say Israel is exculpated, but does say this:
All this said, legitimate findings of the film should be taken seriously. Dramatically changed military circumstances do not suspend rules of proportionality or offer blanket justification for whatever followed. And even if the film turns out to be as dishonest, the civilian toll in Gaza requires examination.
But these questions do at least set a standard that a film must meet to show the immorality it claims. Will it? Did the filmmakers even try?
We’re going to have to wait, though it’s hard for me to believe that the IDF deliberately wanted to kill civilians without adequate military justification. I’m not quite sure why this film is not being shown to everybody who wants to see it, including the IDF. That alone makes me suspicious.
In the fall of 2025, I received an invitation to give a lecture on nature conservation in June 2026 at the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” association at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). I have a long-standing connection to this association and have given several lectures there in previous years. I know the chairman personally and have met with him on numerous occasions for private discussions. My lecture, scheduled for June 2026, required extensive preparation and was to be recorded on video for YouTube. People from other universities were planning to attend. Just two days before the lecture, I had preparatory discussions with the chairman.
And then it happened. Less than 24 hours before the lecture was due to begin, late in the evening, I received an email from the chairman informing me that the lecture had to be canceled. The letter stated, among other things: “We are aware of several previous statements made by you, which have already been discussed in the past and have led to corresponding decisions by the university… After thorough examination and discussions with the relevant departments of HHU, we have come to the conclusion that these statements are incompatible with the principles that HHU and the Friends Association, as organizers, stand for…”
The source of the controversy remains unnamed.
What had I done wrong? The “responsible departments of HHU” never identified themselves to me, and nothing was ever “discussed in the past.” I don’t know who was discussing this. The rejection letter from the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” only mentions an “equal opportunities organization.”
My assumption stems from the module “Fundamentals of Biodiversity and Evolution” that I taught in 2024. A key part of this module’s content involved explaining the biological concept of a species. The species concept can only be explained by comparing the characteristics that distinguish two species with those that differentiate the two sexes. This was therefore also part of the curriculum.
Several students complained vehemently about my statements regarding gender differences during the subsequent evaluation of the course and even filed a complaint against me. My statements were reinterpreted as an alleged verbatim statement that “women cannot think.” I never made such a statement and never would, because it would be utterly absurd. The lawyers of the “Network for Academic Freedom” describe the whole affair as an “outrageous incident” and have already stated in an “Open Letter to the Executive Board of HHU” that this is based on a statement that was never made, the assertion of which constitutes the criminal offense of defamation under Section 187 of the German Criminal Code.
Removal from office without debate
The equal opportunities officer of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, who also chairs the Biology Research Unit, accepted this statement as true and immediately relieved me of all my teaching duties (including supervising bachelor’s theses) without verifying the students’ alleged statements and without granting me the right to a discussion and defense. The examination board and the second supervisors of my bachelor’s students’ theses were not consulted. Yet, my ethical conduct could easily have been verified on my website. The majority of my bachelor’s, diploma, and doctoral students, as well as most of the co-authors of my publications, were women. I was powerless to challenge my immediate dismissal from all my teaching positions, which I had continued to hold without pay after my retirement, because I no longer had any legal right to teach.
It was apparently these events, which took place almost two years ago, that forced the chairman of the “Friends of the Botanical Garden” to cancel my aforementioned lecture at short notice, with the words: “We have become aware of several previous statements made by you, which have already been discussed in the past and have led to corresponding decisions by the university…”
Again we see a professor penalized after ridiculous student accusations. Species, like sexes, are not “defined” but “recognized”. Yes of course there are cases where species are not absolutely distinguished, though those (particularly when allopatric) are much more frequent than individuals who are neither male nor female (about 1/5600 or less). But in both cases we are dealing are biological realities that exist independent of definition (e.g., H. sapiens doesn’t blur into any other species, nor do Pallas cats or platypuses). Just as nature is lumpy with respect to types of animals and plants, so is nature lumpy with respect to the kinds of animals that produce gametes (in that case there are two lumps). They really should apologize to professor Kunz.
The last vestiges of warmth drained out of a Tyrannosaurus rex’s body around 66 million years ago, but scientists just used chemistry to take the long-extinct dinosaur’s temperature: 97 degrees, give or take a few.
The new finding securely situates the king of the dinosaurs among the warm-blooded animals, confirming previous years of research.
T. rex ran hot, but not too hot, according to the study, published Wednesday in Science Advances. Instead, the reading places it somewhere on the body-temperature spectrum near large mammals like Indian elephants (97 degrees) or humans (98 degrees) or flightless birds like ostriches (101 to 103 degrees) — but nowhere near the heat of a chicken, say (105 to 107 degrees).
“That is absolutely spectacular,” said Jasmina Wiemann, a molecular paleobiologist at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in the study.
So how did they do it?
To take the body temperature of a long extinct, school-bus-size predator, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a clever geochemistry technique on fossilized teeth, including two from “Thomas,” a famous T. rex in the collection of the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.
The team first used a dental drill to sample the tough outer enamel from the teeth, and then took advantage of a remarkable fact: The chemical bonds within minerals can tell their own stories.
“Basically, at the point a mineral forms there are elements of its chemistry that are kind of frozen in time,” said Robert Eagle, a geobiologist and one of the leaders of the study.
. . . Dr. Eagle and his colleagues analyzed the bonds between two isotopes; heavier versions of both carbon and oxygen. Those bonds acted like a thermometer: The more bonds present, the lower the body temperature.
For a gut check, they also compared the T. rex teeth to those of ancient crocodilians excavated from the same site Hell Creek Formation in Montana. T. rex measured 97 degrees; the crocodilians ran much cooler at, on average, 88 degrees.
Being warm-blooded is associated with a more active lifestyle and means the “tyrant lizard” could live in a broad range of environments. The researchers calculated that, at least from a temperature tolerance point of view, T. rex could have roamed over most of the North American continent, from Alaska to Mexico.
. . .Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, pointed out in an email that the body temperature reading opens up a whole new set of questions about how this celebrity dinosaur operated.
One possibility is that T. rex was warm-blooded the way humans are, with a constant and hot body temperature regulated by an internal furnace, Dr. Brusatte said. Another possibility is that T. rex was more like a giant, terrifying insulated coffee cup that takes forever to cool down.
The way to answer that question, at least tentatively, is to look at the chemical bonds in relatives of T. rex that were not so big, and so would cool down quickly. If they also showed evidence of warm-bloodedness, particularly in very small dinos, that would suggest that homeothermy was an ancestral trait.
Here’s a figure from the paper comparing the isotopically-calculated body temperatures from various groups, along with the environmentally calcualted temperature (see the paper for free here to read more):
(From paper): Fig. 1. Comparison of calculated Δ47 temperatures for T. rex, crocodilians, and bivalves from the HCF along with body temperature ranges of modern birds, mammals, and reptiles. (A) Symbols indicate sample averages for individual tooth specimens, with error bars indicating 1 SE. For T. rex, circles indicate samples from LACM 150167 teeth, and the triangle indicates the single LACM 151468 tooth. Vertical dashed lines indicate taxon averages, and shaded regions under data points indicate 95% confidence interval (CI). Bivalve and modern animal bars indicate the full range of temperatures reported in their respective studies: The upper light gray bars indicate model results and show yearly temperature range at 3× CO2 concentration, while the lower dark gray bar shows 6× CO2 concentration. Both bars show the full range of monthly temperatures with a dark vertical line to indicate mean annual temperature. 1Tobin et al. (37), 2Clarke and Rotherty (38), 3Eagle et al. (11). All silhouettes are licensed under Creative Commons license CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Artist credits: Manuel Brea Lueiro (T. rex), Guillaume Dera (crocodilian), Pablo Amador Crespo (bivalve).
Dolly Parton ’s megawatt smile and big wavy locks are gracing fields across the U.S. and Canada this fall.
Twenty farms have carved out large corn mazes to honor the late country music icon, actor and philanthropist and raise money for her Imagination Library, which provides free books to children.
The “Jolene” crooner’s death due to cancer on Aug. 25 in Nashville at age 80 brought an outpouring of tributes. They ranged from a drive to rename the country music capital’s airport in Parton’s honor to a surge in online streams of “9 to 5,” “Islands in the Stream” and her many other hit songs.
Now she is being immortalized in corn, with the mazes located in about a dozen states and two provinces, from Alabama to California and Ohio to Texas. Most also feature a Parton-themed trivia game, photo ops and other offerings.
Brett Herbst, founder of The Maize Inc., the Utah-based consulting company that designed the mazes, called Parton a “true American treasure.”
The company said the mazes were in the works months before Parton died and are part of its annual campaign honoring country music’s brightest stars. Previous honorees included Reba McEntire in 2023, Luke Bryan in 2024 and Lainey Wilson in 2025.
Parton, who famously grew up poor in rural Tennessee, thanked organizers for supporting her charity before to her death. In a statement provided by The Maize Inc., she encouraged people to “get lost in this year’s country music corn maze for a little fun, laughter and a real good reason to get lost.”
Here’s a video:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is becoming quite philosophical:
Hili: I look and wonder?
Andrzej: What about?
Hili: Where does time disappear to?
In Polish:
Hili: patrzę i zastanawiam się?
Ja: Nad czym?
Hili: Gdzie ucieka czas?
From Luana, and not a surprise: “inclusive excellence”:
I thought the tweet below must be omitting some critical context or paraphrasing the text ungenerously.
But no, the NYT actually published an op-ed that claims the University of California hasn’t sacrificed excellence even though it admits students who struggle with basic math. https://t.co/fTZjZnIG3Ipic.twitter.com/hAitGCNqb1
Also from Luana (click to go to page as I can’t embed this by itself):
Two from my feed. First, a new species of cat discovered, and not just a subspecies, either. See the article here. It’s called the tilcayo tiger cat.
New cat alert! A call from a wildlife sanctuary about a “weird cat” has led to the first new cat species discovered in over 100 years in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion. Learn more about this feline surprise: https://t.co/crffXvPqH4pic.twitter.com/USo7rI3Y5q
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was two years old and would be 86 today had she lived. https://t.co/sFswTlMyB9
