The article you posted is also posted as hyperlink in the article you're commenting on. "Stanford University geneticist Greg Barsh told Sara Reardon at Science in 2024"
This is fairly typical for genetic studies. We can observe an association, without understanding the causal relationship. Those of us who take the molecular biology/biophysical view of genes and proteins have been watching the geneticists slowly discover that "the allele of a gene that codes for" mental model is very limited; at least they're starting to pay more attention to the regulatory changes and indels and structural rearrangements, even if they don't have the tools to explain the underlying mechanism.
Like most hair/skin coloring, it's related to melanin production, regulation, and distribution.
Very often the appropriate lens for genetic expression isn’t traits, it’s tools - a gene knockout isn’t “blue eyes now”, it’s “socket #6 is missing from the kit,” which is why you’ll see blue eyes and a bunch of other unrelated stuff.
Yes; the molecular biologists have been pointing out this for decades. Trait-based genetics really set back the mental model for understanding complex phenotypes (the ultimate phenotype being the molecular structure of an entire human being over time). It's been an uphill battle to fight the long-term insistence of genetics professors that we just need to do a few more association studies on larger genome populations and all of diseases will be cured.
But I don't know how well a gene knockout maps to a single tool missing (in terms of analogy); due to the intricate, complex, functional history of evolution, many genes play multiple roles (a wrench can be used as a hammer), and many phenotypes are resilient to loss of one or another tool (can't find wrench? Use this hammer instead!) Understanding those details at the molecular level and relating them to the full human phenotype has been a major interest of mine for decades, but I can't say I really understand anything about it.
Tool blueprints, I might suggest. (I.e. genes are blueprints for tool proteins/enzymes/etc.)
Though with the weird proviso that every so often, each cell opens up its cabinet of blueprints and just 3D-prints up one of every tool it has a blueprint for, unless sees a sticky note on the blueprint telling it to skip (silence/suppress) printing one of that tool for now.
(And, if anyone is wondering, this strategy of "just always print all tools unless otherwise specified" works because these tools are mostly very flimsy, breaking/being consumed quickly after just a few uses, sometimes as little as one. So there's a constant need for new prints of most of these tools. The ones that are more durable, the cell has to be more careful to not overproduce.)
I say that "tool blueprints" is a useful model, because it makes it more intuitive that e.g. for the important stuff, the genome keeps a pile of duplicate blueprints for the same tool; and then also keeps some machinery (autosense suppressors) to add and remove notes to those blueprints on observing that there's "enough" or "not enough" of the tool floating around inside/outside the cell. Which allows "having N redundant tool blueprints" to work just like "having only one tool blueprint" does, rather than drowning you in printed tools; yet also ensures that if something scribbles over one of the blueprints, everything "just keeps working", since the machinery will just end up unsilencing the other blueprints more often. (And also, as a bonus, allows the "corrupted" duplicate blueprints to act as forks of the parent blueprint, gradually being redrawn over N generations of mutations into a working blueprint for a new tool, much more quickly than a new tool blueprint could be mutated into existence from scratch, and without losing the ability to produce the original tool in the process.)
---
Oh, and to be even more pedantic, it's probably best to think of genes as tool part blueprints, since several proteins might need to come together and link up to make a functional tool; and since a single part might end up being consumed in the creation of several different tools. (But that doesn't really add much to predictive intuition, unless you're trying to predict the precise failure modes of any particular tool's production under a point mutation of a single part. You can mostly forget about it.)
See, this is the dicsussion I didn't want to have. I don't really care about the analogies, I care about the mechanistic details in a holistic way, and I've concluded that no human alive is smart enough to understand that, so we need AI to help us make forward progress on complex phenotypes now.
The color is genetic. The behavior is due to them not having a soul. While there is an obvious relationship, it's not direct but mediated by the color.
I have gone through a slow attrition of “serious” subs over the years as they’ve all slowly become toxic. I pretty much just have goofy, fun stuff or niche interests left at this point.
I have stopped visiting Reddit after they dropped support for old.reddit.com. I use lemmy.world now. I did notice an increase in cat posts on Reddit before I quit
That was the final straw for me as well. Forcing you to log in to see old.reddit.com + forcing you into the app when viewing on mobile + the general toxicity just made it no longer worth it to use Reddit.
That's how I've treated it too, if a sub has gone from making me happy to making me angry, it's gone, and "cute picture of cats" seems to be more resistant.
Cat picture pollution arrived around 2005 with Facebook. Directly driving it was the new idea of a cellphone camera. AOL and the era before it didn't have the cat picture pollution problem because they didn't have the technology to post them.
> If you're looking for a boost of household happiness, then you might want to consider getting yourself a cat.
> In a new study published in PLOS One, an international team of researchers analyzed publicly available data across 93 countries to examine the relationship between happiness scores, domestic cat density, and infection rates of Toxoplasma gondii – the parasite that affects as many as 1 in 3 people and which felines are the primary host of.
> ...
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
Wealth, health, cats and Toxoplasma gondii: An ecological correlational study of subjective well-being across 93 countries (September 30, 2026) - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357911
> Conclusion
> This ecological study provides novel insights into the magnitude and robustness of the associations between happiness, cat density, T. gondii exposure, and socioeconomic factors across 93 countries. Our main findings showed that, besides the typical associations between subjective well-being and some socioeconomic factors, national happiness was largely and positively associated with cat density and largely and negatively associated with IgM T. gondii exposure. These results underscore the need for future studies integrating both socioeconomic and biological determinants of happiness and including longitudinal and interdisciplinary approaches to elucidate the underlying mechanisms and processes.
Thank you Claudia. The cat pollution problem predates your training. In summation, cat pictures started as a nonpathogenec virus on Facebook and slowly matured into a slight benefit to some and an off-topic scourge to others. It's net benefit to humanity are debatable.
Based on what evidence do you think that post was LLM-generated?
I can assure you it was 0.000% influenced by artificial systems.
Evidently, evaluating human sentiments is outside the scope of your training.
EDIT: Oh, wait, it must have been the emdashes! Sorry, I've been using those since before LLMs were invented. Where do you think the LLMs learned to use emdashes? From competent writers who used emdashes centuries before computers were even invented. Yeah, and that "flag" is soooo 2023. Please try to keep up.
Though, slight typography nit—and I don't especially like being a pedant except when I can teach something—the em-dash isn't typically set off by spaces as you've done. The only real exception that I can recall off-hand is in newspapers, and that's for reasons of space management.
I never understood the extreme love for cats. I considered getting one for my daughter but the toxoplasmosis alone makes cat ownership an immediate nope and that’s before the cat piss/poop you can immediately smell in a house with cats in them.
Cats spent the last 4000 years or so evolving to be more adorable to humans. The reasons we love cats are rooted in our basic cognitive functions, which cats are abusing. I am not taking a piss when I say that people who don't like cats are more likely to be neurodivergent.
I would like you to expand on how my neurodivergence argument holds up if it doesn't hold up in the way I think it does. If you're about to say autists like cats more, I'm going to flip the desk.
Perhaps in US that's true but I doubt it if you look at the world as a whole.
For example, Indian(from India) hate dogs on average. That's 1.5 billion right there.
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
That’s what I like about cats. I don’t need some dog staring at me constantly looking for direction, my cat has his own agenda that sometimes includes sitting by me.
I similarly prefer romantic partners with their own stuff going on outside of me vs someone who devotes their entire existence to me and needs to be directed.
pretty sure its a sex thing - makes sense for females to lift up their rear and I guess there isn't any evolutionary pressure for that sensitivity to not exist in males as well.
This would be a plausible explanation tho I've been told that cats don't move their tail that way when they're in heat. It doesn't go up but rather sideways.
Yes. But we also call redheads "redheads" as a rule, not "gingers" - except that the "ginger" thing has filtered over here via the Internet in the past, I dunno, 20 years.
Like, I can't recall anybody describing a redheaded person as a "ginger" in the 80s or 90s, (location: Missouri) it's something I've only encountered since there's been more language cross-pollination due to the Internet.
South Park really spread "ginger" as the term in the US. Since that episode, everyone I know uses ginger instead of redhead, whereas I only learned the word ginger from that episode.
This sense of biscuit persisted in US English for a long time. The National Biscuit Company (makers of oreos and fig newtons) only changed its name to Nabisco in 1931. The Kennedy Biscuit Company was subsumed by the New York Biscuit Company which merged with the American Biscuit Company to form the National Biscuit Company in 1898. Closes Wikipedia
Cookies in the UK are a subset of biscuits, but not all biscuits are cookies. Do you not have any other types of biscuits (using the UK term) in the US?
No, a biscuit in the US almost universally narrowly refers to a flaky, buttery, savory pastry typically eaten at breakfast, either with a sweet jam or a savory sausage gravy.
“Biscuit” is not a category of foods in the US, while “cookie” is absolutely a category of desert with many different kinds.
If you ask for a biscuit here, you’ll get the same thing every time. If you ask for a cookie, you’ll be asked “what kind?”
But the etymology of a word doesn't prove that someone is using that word wrong, or people on both sides of the pond would have to start baking our biscuits a second time.
In the US, "ginger" is a seasoning, not a color. Like, in general; we do not refer to anything as being ginger-colored unless it's a sort of pale yellowish tan.
That's a fairly new thing. Growing up, I never heard anyone use "ginger" in that way. It was always "redhead." Or sometimes "strawberry blonde" for lighter shades.
It's true. A person is ginger, but nobody ever says things are ginger coloured. Ginger isn't even really one colour - it's a spectrum of orange-containing hair colours.
Were there many reds around when you were growing up? My family is full of redheads, and ginger was a well known term to me. I'm much older than South Park
My experience (cat owner myself, son of cat owners and regular cat-sitter) confirms what the article says: orange cats are no more or less prone to doing seemingly stupid/weird things than cats of any other color. More seriously, I think this stereotype is a direct continuation of stereotypes against red-haired humans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_...), so it shouldn't be encouraged...
Tell that to my female Standard Issue Cats lol. One is food motivated, pretty intelligent when it comes to food and pretty fat, and her twin sister is routinely making me wonder if she's an orange cat with a modified fur. Dumb as rocks but excessively cute.
"Almost always male" is slightly overstating things. Cat color is a sex linked gene, so a male cat is orange when it has a copy of the gene on its single X chromosome. Female cats can also be orange under normal circumstances though, and about 20% of orange cats are female.
Compare that to tortoiseshell or calico cats, which requires two different color genes (with calico requiring the "white spotted" gene in addition to two colors). That means something unusual usually has to happen for those colors to occur in male cats, which is why less than 0.1% of calicos are male.
I had couple of cats (orange male and tortoiseshell female) that lived 20 years after I picked them off the street. The female had only one kidney and the male had an extra vertebra but these things only became a problem in their last year.
They were both very calm creatures. The male was one of the most gentle cats I've ever known. I really miss him greeting me by nodding at me from the sofa when I got home.
Can you describe what the male looked like? I have a tortoiseshell who's all crooked. Her paws are twisted inward, her tail is shaped like a spring, her rear legs are longer than her front legs. She's all weird. Now I'm wondering if she has extra stuff like a vertebra too. Does your male cat looked overall normal despite the extra vertebra?
We had a cat with a "pig tail" as in his tail was shaped like a pig's and couldn't straighten out. The vet said it was some relatively common birth defect and wasn't a major issue.
Oh, cool! I never heard about another cat with a similar tail as my tortie's. The vet said she was probably born like that, but didn't say anything about this being common-ish.
My brain seized up trying to picture this. They didn't say vertebrum, so that's not just a wee bone but a whole other second spine! How does it even...?? I must know!
You're correct. My neophyte Latin chops be exposed. Let me explain what I just learned with my figurative antennae (plural, not antenna which also ends in 'a' and is singular), something about first and second declensions and neutered...
I was just thinking how behavioral differences of red haired foxes, cats, and humans from their closest relatives are explained by the same sort of proopiomelanocortin and other substantia nigra differences from weak MC1R activity.
As someone who lives with 4 cats, one of which who is orange and conforming with all stereotypes, I implore you to further that line of inquiry. While the OP paper doesn’t claim behavioral differences are supported, it doesn’t falsify them and there could be a dynamic there. If you could genetically encode shamelessness it might encapsulate the behavior. It’s not a lack of intelligence per se, more of a lack of inhibition.
This paper demonstrates a connection with behavior. I personally suspect gingers have smaller amygdala.
Did you know people with blue eyes are more likely to have bipolar disorder? This of course doesn’t mean everyone blue eyes has bipolar disorder but it makes it more likely. I think the issue may be playing out in orange cats as well. It’s certainly not going to give me every orange is weird, but it increases the likelihood and I think that’s why we see the stereotype play out.
I had an orange cat growing up in the 1970s well before the Internet and out of the seven cast I own as a child. It was very much different.
Which makes sense because anesthesia doesn’t work on them as well. One or two encounters with a dentist that doesn’t know it and it’s quite natural to develop such a fear.
That's true. They seem to be more sensitive to pain in general, though. And I've wondered if that might in some people lead to a heightened degree of something called Misanthropic Person Memory: https://oscarybarra.lsa.umich.edu/Main_Site/Publications_fil...
It's extremely interesting that the genes that regulate this are non-protein coding. More light shed on the actual functionality of "junk" DNA, even if it's for cats.
So in the US, they call them orange cats. In Korea, we call them 'cheese tabbies' or 'cheese nyang(kitten).' Someday, when I leave this place, I'd like to get a cat. I really like the ones with broad faces. But right now, I can barely even take care of myself
They finally proved that the brain cells of all orange cats are a single brain cell in a quantum state of superposition between all of them? Erwin Schrödinger would be proud.
I've long held that the nine lives of a cat are not a sequential thing, but a quantum superposition of the cat. Just as Pavlov selected dogs for his classic experiment in psychology; Schrödinger - understanding the quantum nature of cats - selected a cat for his thought experiment.
A cat lives nine simultaneous lives. This explains many of the phenomena that one observes with cats.
First off, there's the classic "that looks like my cat" from the internet, that other cat could very well be a parallel instance of your cat.
Second, there's the perceived goofiness of cats as they chase imaginary things when they're forgetting where their bodies are at a given time. One instance of the cat could be locked in mortal combat with the elusive red dot while the other one is jumping at what looks to the humans around him as zoomies or greebles ( https://www.reddit.com/r/greebles/ ).
Kittens are especially prone to being confused by their quantum nature and prone to those activities.
The easiest way to pay attention to only one self-instance for a cat is the simplest, sleep. This is why cats have been reported to sleep 12 - 16 hours, and kittens up to 20 hours per day ( https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much ).
That could be why my cat, age 6, still hasn't figured out that that tentacle thing that always follows him is his own tail. He thinks it's another quantum Obie.
This leads us to Winger's cat (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend ). In the novel Timelike Infinity (great series btw), the Ultimate Observer is claimed to be the consciousness at the end of universe that collapses all entangled wave functions. Note the word "entangled" ... like a ball of yarn. The ultimate observer is a cat with a cosmic ball of yarn tracing back the histories of every particle.
Wave function collapse isn't caused by an observer, but rather "does the cat care about this?"
Depressing that some would call you a kook. Creativity is where new science happens.
I have often been called a kook myself. I feel my Schizoaffevctive disorder is expressed because the quantum state most people express is not the same as mine.
Interesting question. Cats apparently have "dichromatic" vision, and orange is among the colors that they basically can't distinguish from grey.
I have an orange male. He's awesome, and he doesn't leave anything on the table as far as cognitive ability goes. He's just very wrapped up in his important cat business that mostly resolves around territory, chipmunks and hanging out with his enemies.
My cat desperately meowed at me this morning to go outside to hang out with her enemies, which I denied her request. She brought a very much alive and unharmed chipmunk home the other day which was booking it around our great room until we corralled him outside with a broom. The live bird incident was even more dramatic. It’s like having a mischievious goblin living in your house. But she does keep the mice from coming in during the winter!
My parents' cat delivered a live baby bunny to the entrance hallways in the middle of my pre-wedding dinner. Once released the thing unfroze and zoomed under some baskets. It was an all-hands-on-deck exercise to corral both the terrified bunny, as well as the over-excited large dog who "wanted to get to know it".
“ Arhgap36 is known to cause developmental problems in other animals when it is over- or under-functioning. But it seems that in orange cats, the gene is overexpressed only in developing and mature pigment cells called melanocytes.”
This doesn’t make sense… if thousands of anecdotal reports in cats specifically report otherwise? And if it’s known to not be limited to melanocytes in other mammalian species?
Another anecdata - my cat growing up was orange, and he was plenty smart. He was very relaxed/chill but would come when called and was an excellent hunter of the house mice.
His mom was a very intelligent calico (she communicated with people impressively well), and his dad was an unknown feral cat, so I think his smart-cat genes were more noticeable than whatever correlates with orange.
So did my orange. He learned to open doors so he can maybe get some food.
He doesn't play with any of the cat toys (our other cat loves those and begs to play), is barely active and only runs (his whole belly jiggles side-to-side when he's running) after his dental treats which we throw so he can get some exercise.
He's an odd ball for sure. Goofy, loving. A little chubby, but the vet says it is probably fine considering his laziness and he is healthy otherwise (knock-wood).
Humans carry this GTPase as well. GTP is energy source of receptors called G protein coupled receptors. They are about 750 these and many of them are catecholamine receptors, like the serotonin and dopamine receptors.
For cats it very well may be different. Genes do not express activity the same indifferent species and they’re definitely not the same in different parts of the body. Genes can express RNA in one part of the body and more DNA and another part.
But I think this deletion is really about how it affects the methylation the gene.
"We first performed RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) on skin tissues obtained from the auricles of different adult calico cats (#19, #20, and #22, females, precise ages unknown)"
Auricles are the earlobes.
"We then analyzed multiple skin tissues obtained from a young calico cat that died of unknown causes (#01, female, 3 weeks old) "
"A) Expression levels of ARHGAP36 and IGSF1 in cat auricles (left) and skin tissues (right). RNA-seq data were obtained in small auricle pieces of different coat colors derived from different cats (left) and in skin samples of different coat colors derived from a single calico cat (#01) (right)."
Biological samples
Domestic cat blood Inakazu Dog & Cat Kashii Hospital https://www.inakazu-vet.com/
Domestic cat ovary Cat clinics in Japan N/A
Domestic cat auricular Cat clinics in Japan N/A
I thought this seemed familiar; it's a rehash of a 2024 discovery: https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-behind-orange-f...
The article you posted is also posted as hyperlink in the article you're commenting on. "Stanford University geneticist Greg Barsh told Sara Reardon at Science in 2024"
The article says there's no evidence of the gene being responsible for behavior.
Which means it's inconclusive if the gene is responsible for behavior.
But, collectively we know it may be.
This is fairly typical for genetic studies. We can observe an association, without understanding the causal relationship. Those of us who take the molecular biology/biophysical view of genes and proteins have been watching the geneticists slowly discover that "the allele of a gene that codes for" mental model is very limited; at least they're starting to pay more attention to the regulatory changes and indels and structural rearrangements, even if they don't have the tools to explain the underlying mechanism.
Like most hair/skin coloring, it's related to melanin production, regulation, and distribution.
Very often the appropriate lens for genetic expression isn’t traits, it’s tools - a gene knockout isn’t “blue eyes now”, it’s “socket #6 is missing from the kit,” which is why you’ll see blue eyes and a bunch of other unrelated stuff.
(With love to my blue-eyed friends in the thread)
Yes; the molecular biologists have been pointing out this for decades. Trait-based genetics really set back the mental model for understanding complex phenotypes (the ultimate phenotype being the molecular structure of an entire human being over time). It's been an uphill battle to fight the long-term insistence of genetics professors that we just need to do a few more association studies on larger genome populations and all of diseases will be cured.
But I don't know how well a gene knockout maps to a single tool missing (in terms of analogy); due to the intricate, complex, functional history of evolution, many genes play multiple roles (a wrench can be used as a hammer), and many phenotypes are resilient to loss of one or another tool (can't find wrench? Use this hammer instead!) Understanding those details at the molecular level and relating them to the full human phenotype has been a major interest of mine for decades, but I can't say I really understand anything about it.
Tool blueprints, I might suggest. (I.e. genes are blueprints for tool proteins/enzymes/etc.)
Though with the weird proviso that every so often, each cell opens up its cabinet of blueprints and just 3D-prints up one of every tool it has a blueprint for, unless sees a sticky note on the blueprint telling it to skip (silence/suppress) printing one of that tool for now.
(And, if anyone is wondering, this strategy of "just always print all tools unless otherwise specified" works because these tools are mostly very flimsy, breaking/being consumed quickly after just a few uses, sometimes as little as one. So there's a constant need for new prints of most of these tools. The ones that are more durable, the cell has to be more careful to not overproduce.)
I say that "tool blueprints" is a useful model, because it makes it more intuitive that e.g. for the important stuff, the genome keeps a pile of duplicate blueprints for the same tool; and then also keeps some machinery (autosense suppressors) to add and remove notes to those blueprints on observing that there's "enough" or "not enough" of the tool floating around inside/outside the cell. Which allows "having N redundant tool blueprints" to work just like "having only one tool blueprint" does, rather than drowning you in printed tools; yet also ensures that if something scribbles over one of the blueprints, everything "just keeps working", since the machinery will just end up unsilencing the other blueprints more often. (And also, as a bonus, allows the "corrupted" duplicate blueprints to act as forks of the parent blueprint, gradually being redrawn over N generations of mutations into a working blueprint for a new tool, much more quickly than a new tool blueprint could be mutated into existence from scratch, and without losing the ability to produce the original tool in the process.)
---
Oh, and to be even more pedantic, it's probably best to think of genes as tool part blueprints, since several proteins might need to come together and link up to make a functional tool; and since a single part might end up being consumed in the creation of several different tools. (But that doesn't really add much to predictive intuition, unless you're trying to predict the precise failure modes of any particular tool's production under a point mutation of a single part. You can mostly forget about it.)
See, this is the dicsussion I didn't want to have. I don't really care about the analogies, I care about the mechanistic details in a holistic way, and I've concluded that no human alive is smart enough to understand that, so we need AI to help us make forward progress on complex phenotypes now.
Yeah but there's good reason for an investigation here, in particular:
Said every scientist who wanted more grant funding.
The color is genetic. The behavior is due to them not having a soul. While there is an obvious relationship, it's not direct but mediated by the color.
The behavior is because of having one orange brain cell.
https://www.reddit.com/r/catbongos/
Recently I went through the list of all of the subs that I follow and 80% of them were all cat related.
Do you think it’s always been that way?
I have gone through a slow attrition of “serious” subs over the years as they’ve all slowly become toxic. I pretty much just have goofy, fun stuff or niche interests left at this point.
It’s why I had to give up Reddit entirely.
Impossible to follow any topic without it devolving into political flame wars.
I have stopped visiting Reddit after they dropped support for old.reddit.com. I use lemmy.world now. I did notice an increase in cat posts on Reddit before I quit
That was the final straw for me as well. Forcing you to log in to see old.reddit.com + forcing you into the app when viewing on mobile + the general toxicity just made it no longer worth it to use Reddit.
set the cookie "redesign_optout" to true
> Impossible to follow any topic without it devolving into political flame wars.
But have you considered how that is Donald Trump/Joe Biden's fault?
/s in case it isn't obvious.
That’s a healthy way to use Reddit. Everything else is mostly rage bait.
That's how I've treated it too, if a sub has gone from making me happy to making me angry, it's gone, and "cute picture of cats" seems to be more resistant.
Cat picture pollution arrived around 2005 with Facebook. Directly driving it was the new idea of a cellphone camera. AOL and the era before it didn't have the cat picture pollution problem because they didn't have the technology to post them.
Some of the earliest photos after the photograph was invented are of people’s cats.
It is not pollution when it is the desirable outcome.
It isn't like the relevant environment — the set of Internet forums — somehow predates human influence; it is nothing but the sum of human influence.
Cat pictures at least add joy and mirth, and are driven by real people without outside motivation.
If anything is pollution in that environment / context, is is the rise of content driven by surveillance capitalism and political corruption.
At this point (at the risk of turning a measure into a target), might we be able to gauge the natural-ness of a forum by the number of cat pics?
> Cat pictures at least add joy and mirth, and are driven by real people without outside motivation.
Scientists Find a Surprising Link Between Cats And Happiness Across 93 Countries (05 October 2026) https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-a-surprising-li...
> If you're looking for a boost of household happiness, then you might want to consider getting yourself a cat.
> In a new study published in PLOS One, an international team of researchers analyzed publicly available data across 93 countries to examine the relationship between happiness scores, domestic cat density, and infection rates of Toxoplasma gondii – the parasite that affects as many as 1 in 3 people and which felines are the primary host of.
> ...
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
Wealth, health, cats and Toxoplasma gondii: An ecological correlational study of subjective well-being across 93 countries (September 30, 2026) - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357911
> Conclusion
> This ecological study provides novel insights into the magnitude and robustness of the associations between happiness, cat density, T. gondii exposure, and socioeconomic factors across 93 countries. Our main findings showed that, besides the typical associations between subjective well-being and some socioeconomic factors, national happiness was largely and positively associated with cat density and largely and negatively associated with IgM T. gondii exposure. These results underscore the need for future studies integrating both socioeconomic and biological determinants of happiness and including longitudinal and interdisciplinary approaches to elucidate the underlying mechanisms and processes.
Thank you Claudia. The cat pollution problem predates your training. In summation, cat pictures started as a nonpathogenec virus on Facebook and slowly matured into a slight benefit to some and an off-topic scourge to others. It's net benefit to humanity are debatable.
Based on what evidence do you think that post was LLM-generated?
I can assure you it was 0.000% influenced by artificial systems.
Evidently, evaluating human sentiments is outside the scope of your training.
EDIT: Oh, wait, it must have been the emdashes! Sorry, I've been using those since before LLMs were invented. Where do you think the LLMs learned to use emdashes? From competent writers who used emdashes centuries before computers were even invented. Yeah, and that "flag" is soooo 2023. Please try to keep up.
Though, slight typography nit—and I don't especially like being a pedant except when I can teach something—the em-dash isn't typically set off by spaces as you've done. The only real exception that I can recall off-hand is in newspapers, and that's for reasons of space management.
I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of all subreddits are cat related.
Get rid of the other 20%.
I've been blocking subs in RES for years now, it's over 7000 last I checked and most I see on /r/all now is cat content. It's GLORIOUS
I don't think I've ever visited /r/all, it seems like a terrible place.
I agree, but for a long time it was the only way to discover new niche subs
fyi: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd6EjvCDRRWlkHjEYvSfOkA
I never understood the extreme love for cats. I considered getting one for my daughter but the toxoplasmosis alone makes cat ownership an immediate nope and that’s before the cat piss/poop you can immediately smell in a house with cats in them.
Cats spent the last 4000 years or so evolving to be more adorable to humans. The reasons we love cats are rooted in our basic cognitive functions, which cats are abusing. I am not taking a piss when I say that people who don't like cats are more likely to be neurodivergent.
I know it’s sexist, but I don’t trust men who like cats more than dogs.
> I am not taking a piss when I say that people who don't like cats are more likely to be neurodivergent.
“Dog people” heavily outnumber “cat people” almost always in polls. Like 44% to 18% in this one https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/docume...
Your neurodivergence argument holds up, just not in the way you think it does.
I would like you to expand on how my neurodivergence argument holds up if it doesn't hold up in the way I think it does. If you're about to say autists like cats more, I'm going to flip the desk.
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Perhaps in US that's true but I doubt it if you look at the world as a whole. For example, Indian(from India) hate dogs on average. That's 1.5 billion right there.
I prefer animals that shit in a box to animals that eat their own shit and barf it up and eat it again.
Plus it’s probably the toxoplasmosis that brainwashes us to love those furry little things.
> Plus it’s probably the toxoplasmosis that brainwashes us to love those furry little things.
Elsecomment I mentioned a recent article. Scientists Find a Surprising Link Between Cats And Happiness Across 93 Countries - https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-a-surprising-li...
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
The paper itself is https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357911
Not in mine!
The main thing I don’t like about cats is that they feel like they don’t really like their owners but more just tolerate them
I don't know what cats you've interacted with, but my cats literally use me as furniture and cry at me when they can't.
That’s what I like about cats. I don’t need some dog staring at me constantly looking for direction, my cat has his own agenda that sometimes includes sitting by me.
I similarly prefer romantic partners with their own stuff going on outside of me vs someone who devotes their entire existence to me and needs to be directed.
To me that’s a feature, not a bug .
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this one is always funny, anyone know why my orange would pull his ass so high to get a nice smack? almost as if they feel some sort of relief
It might just be because he loves you. Of course, it could also be:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scent_rubbing#Domestic_cat
pretty sure its a sex thing - makes sense for females to lift up their rear and I guess there isn't any evolutionary pressure for that sensitivity to not exist in males as well.
This would be a plausible explanation tho I've been told that cats don't move their tail that way when they're in heat. It doesn't go up but rather sideways.
So maybe it's that but maybe it's something else.
Ever have someone bang on your lower back that way? It feels good :)
This is why people go to chiropractors.
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Wait, do people in the US really call them "orange cats" - I just thought that was a reddit / internet thing.
In the UK these are ginger cats.
Yes. But we also call redheads "redheads" as a rule, not "gingers" - except that the "ginger" thing has filtered over here via the Internet in the past, I dunno, 20 years.
Like, I can't recall anybody describing a redheaded person as a "ginger" in the 80s or 90s, (location: Missouri) it's something I've only encountered since there's been more language cross-pollination due to the Internet.
South Park really spread "ginger" as the term in the US. Since that episode, everyone I know uses ginger instead of redhead, whereas I only learned the word ginger from that episode.
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw
We call them orange cats (gatos laranjas) in Portuguese too!
I thought it was popularized by internet/Reddit as a joke denoting that ginger cats are "special": https://www.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/
No, they've been orange since long before that. Cause, y'know... that's their color!
Turns out it's a dead tie in English books though, wow: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=orange+cat%2Cg...
It's because they have no soul!
Many places outside the US call them orange as well.
Cookie vs biscuit, vacation vs holiday, gasoline vs petrol, etc, etc.
Cookie and biscuit are two different things. Which two depends on country, but still two different things
The point is what in the Uk is called a biscuit in the US is called a cookie. Similarly for the other pairings.
Do ginger cats make the same biscuits as orange cats?
Though, https://www.reddit.com/r/catsinpants/ works for both forms of English.
This sense of biscuit persisted in US English for a long time. The National Biscuit Company (makers of oreos and fig newtons) only changed its name to Nabisco in 1931. The Kennedy Biscuit Company was subsumed by the New York Biscuit Company which merged with the American Biscuit Company to form the National Biscuit Company in 1898. Closes Wikipedia
Cookies in the UK are a subset of biscuits, but not all biscuits are cookies. Do you not have any other types of biscuits (using the UK term) in the US?
No, a biscuit in the US almost universally narrowly refers to a flaky, buttery, savory pastry typically eaten at breakfast, either with a sweet jam or a savory sausage gravy.
“Biscuit” is not a category of foods in the US, while “cookie” is absolutely a category of desert with many different kinds.
If you ask for a biscuit here, you’ll get the same thing every time. If you ask for a cookie, you’ll be asked “what kind?”
No. A biscuit is something entirely different in the US. We just have many types of cookies.
FWIW, I believe petroleum is a synonym for crude oil. If you put it in your cars fuel tank, you'll have a bad time. Gasoline is made from petrolium.
I'm pretty sure petrol means gasoline not petroleum.
Petrol is technically just short for petroleum, which is latin for "rock oil"
Gasoline is from gas + plus the chemical suffix "ol" short for the latin "oleum", and "ine" meaning "made of".
But the etymology of a word doesn't prove that someone is using that word wrong, or people on both sides of the pond would have to start baking our biscuits a second time.
petrol !== petroleum
the confusion is solely in your reading comprehension skills and not in the GP's use of the words
I always found this funny as well. We say ginger cats (chats roux) in French too!
But doesn't roux/rouge just mean "red"?
"Ginger" doesn't mean "red", except for hair color. And that's the interesting part.
Roux is just for hair colour in French. Not the same as rouge.
I'm an ex Brit, living in the US, and have an orange tabby that I like to say is orange, but his name is "Gingey".
Does that help? :)
You might be shocked that we say "red heads" instead of ginger as well.
In the US, "ginger" is a seasoning, not a color. Like, in general; we do not refer to anything as being ginger-colored unless it's a sort of pale yellowish tan.
The redhead, ginger, color link comes from early season ginger, which has reddish pink tips around the leaves right above the fresh root.
People will still refer to redheads as "ginger" but only some of the time
That's a fairly new thing. Growing up, I never heard anyone use "ginger" in that way. It was always "redhead." Or sometimes "strawberry blonde" for lighter shades.
Millennial checking in, ginger was used all the time when I was a kid
Only a ginger should call another person ginger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw
In UK English ginger isn't exactly a color either. It's not like yellow or orange. It's a state of being.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. Does "ginger-colored" sound right to you? It doesn't quite work.
It's true. A person is ginger, but nobody ever says things are ginger coloured. Ginger isn't even really one colour - it's a spectrum of orange-containing hair colours.
If you would then please explain the "kick a ginger day" from SouthPark
South Park popularized it. It was known but not common before that where I lived. It also popularized harassing them in general at my school.
Were there many reds around when you were growing up? My family is full of redheads, and ginger was a well known term to me. I'm much older than South Park
No, only a couple that I knew of. My area was mostly Mexican, then white, then native, then everything else.
Old south-park is no longer culturally relevant.
We use both terms here. Ginger has become more popular recently, probably due to UK Internet influence over recent years.
It’s almost entirely due to the South Park episode about gingers lacking souls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_Kids
Hey now, that's prejudice!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw
I always called the orange even when I was in the UK.
In Australia they're known an ranga cats (ranga as in orangutan).
I'm in the US, but through cultural osmosis, ginger in the UK context is in my vocabulary. I think things like this are going to coalesce, slowly.
UK and USA are brotherly nations divided only by their common language.
in italian we call them "red cats"
They are mostly tabbies at the end of the day. But colloquially, yes: the US tends to simply call them orange.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/ I think it is relevant.
My experience (cat owner myself, son of cat owners and regular cat-sitter) confirms what the article says: orange cats are no more or less prone to doing seemingly stupid/weird things than cats of any other color. More seriously, I think this stereotype is a direct continuation of stereotypes against red-haired humans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_...), so it shouldn't be encouraged...
Most likely this is because orange cats are almost always male, and (neutered) male cats tend to be goofier than females.
I think the association with discrimination against red haired humans is a stretch though
Tell that to my female Standard Issue Cats lol. One is food motivated, pretty intelligent when it comes to food and pretty fat, and her twin sister is routinely making me wonder if she's an orange cat with a modified fur. Dumb as rocks but excessively cute.
"Dumb as rock but excessively cute" ... Funny how that applies to some humans as well!
"Almost always male" is slightly overstating things. Cat color is a sex linked gene, so a male cat is orange when it has a copy of the gene on its single X chromosome. Female cats can also be orange under normal circumstances though, and about 20% of orange cats are female.
Compare that to tortoiseshell or calico cats, which requires two different color genes (with calico requiring the "white spotted" gene in addition to two colors). That means something unusual usually has to happen for those colors to occur in male cats, which is why less than 0.1% of calicos are male.
I had couple of cats (orange male and tortoiseshell female) that lived 20 years after I picked them off the street. The female had only one kidney and the male had an extra vertebra but these things only became a problem in their last year.
They were both very calm creatures. The male was one of the most gentle cats I've ever known. I really miss him greeting me by nodding at me from the sofa when I got home.
Can you describe what the male looked like? I have a tortoiseshell who's all crooked. Her paws are twisted inward, her tail is shaped like a spring, her rear legs are longer than her front legs. She's all weird. Now I'm wondering if she has extra stuff like a vertebra too. Does your male cat looked overall normal despite the extra vertebra?
We had a cat with a "pig tail" as in his tail was shaped like a pig's and couldn't straighten out. The vet said it was some relatively common birth defect and wasn't a major issue.
Oh, cool! I never heard about another cat with a similar tail as my tortie's. The vet said she was probably born like that, but didn't say anything about this being common-ish.
They both looked normal and where quite beautiful cats actually.
We only found out their health issues from exams.
> and the male had an extra vertebra
My brain seized up trying to picture this. They didn't say vertebrum, so that's not just a wee bone but a whole other second spine! How does it even...?? I must know!
Sorry, it was just an extra bone.
Actually, I think I got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebra
You're correct. My neophyte Latin chops be exposed. Let me explain what I just learned with my figurative antennae (plural, not antenna which also ends in 'a' and is singular), something about first and second declensions and neutered...
No that's plenty enough. Carry on!
I agree but I don't think it's related to prejudice against redheaded humans, wrt the cats I think it's some sort of confirmation bias.
Have had >13 cats in my life, and they're all fucking weird.
I was just thinking how behavioral differences of red haired foxes, cats, and humans from their closest relatives are explained by the same sort of proopiomelanocortin and other substantia nigra differences from weak MC1R activity.
As someone who lives with 4 cats, one of which who is orange and conforming with all stereotypes, I implore you to further that line of inquiry. While the OP paper doesn’t claim behavioral differences are supported, it doesn’t falsify them and there could be a dynamic there. If you could genetically encode shamelessness it might encapsulate the behavior. It’s not a lack of intelligence per se, more of a lack of inhibition.
This paper demonstrates a connection with behavior. I personally suspect gingers have smaller amygdala.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381166835_The_Skin-...
Tangential and sample size n = 1, but the two orange cats in my life were spankers/lovers of cat bongos whereas all other coloured cats were not.
There is something different about them, and the red hair thing is a coincidence.
We have a tuxedo boi who is a big fan of the butt bongos, n=1 again but still.
Hey, some of us love and appreciate that red hair too!
Did you know people with blue eyes are more likely to have bipolar disorder? This of course doesn’t mean everyone blue eyes has bipolar disorder but it makes it more likely. I think the issue may be playing out in orange cats as well. It’s certainly not going to give me every orange is weird, but it increases the likelihood and I think that’s why we see the stereotype play out.
I had an orange cat growing up in the 1970s well before the Internet and out of the seven cast I own as a child. It was very much different.
Turns out racism is funny and accepted if directed against those you don't like
Racism towards...orange cats? Is that your contention?
Orange cat has no secret because orange cat has no thought.
Fun fact: people with red hair have more fear for dentists:
https://www.dentistryiq.com/dentistry/article/55260898/redhe...
Which makes sense because anesthesia doesn’t work on them as well. One or two encounters with a dentist that doesn’t know it and it’s quite natural to develop such a fear.
That's true. They seem to be more sensitive to pain in general, though. And I've wondered if that might in some people lead to a heightened degree of something called Misanthropic Person Memory: https://oscarybarra.lsa.umich.edu/Main_Site/Publications_fil...
It's extremely interesting that the genes that regulate this are non-protein coding. More light shed on the actual functionality of "junk" DNA, even if it's for cats.
Realistically, we've been working with non-protein-coding genes for some time, and the controversy about "junk" (true junk) DNA still continues.
See: https://cryptogenomicon.org/encode-says-what.html and https://thefinchandpea.com/2012/09/10/random-genome-naked-ge... for one perspective on how to approach this.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IetAK3sIAZ0
Still no way to track the one neuron that they all share.
Plot twist: It's actually a D-flip-flop. :-)
I wonder why there's no even a trace of "orange cats are goofy" stereotype in Russia and neighboring countries, as far as I know.
So in the US, they call them orange cats. In Korea, we call them 'cheese tabbies' or 'cheese nyang(kitten).' Someday, when I leave this place, I'd like to get a cat. I really like the ones with broad faces. But right now, I can barely even take care of myself
Missed headline opportunity: "60-year orange cat itch finally scratched"
They finally proved that the brain cells of all orange cats are a single brain cell in a quantum state of superposition between all of them? Erwin Schrödinger would be proud.
{I am not a kook - this is creative writing}
I've long held that the nine lives of a cat are not a sequential thing, but a quantum superposition of the cat. Just as Pavlov selected dogs for his classic experiment in psychology; Schrödinger - understanding the quantum nature of cats - selected a cat for his thought experiment.
A cat lives nine simultaneous lives. This explains many of the phenomena that one observes with cats.
First off, there's the classic "that looks like my cat" from the internet, that other cat could very well be a parallel instance of your cat.
Second, there's the perceived goofiness of cats as they chase imaginary things when they're forgetting where their bodies are at a given time. One instance of the cat could be locked in mortal combat with the elusive red dot while the other one is jumping at what looks to the humans around him as zoomies or greebles ( https://www.reddit.com/r/greebles/ ).
Kittens are especially prone to being confused by their quantum nature and prone to those activities.
The easiest way to pay attention to only one self-instance for a cat is the simplest, sleep. This is why cats have been reported to sleep 12 - 16 hours, and kittens up to 20 hours per day ( https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much ).
That could be why my cat, age 6, still hasn't figured out that that tentacle thing that always follows him is his own tail. He thinks it's another quantum Obie.
This implies that the act of observing a cat doesn't collapse their wavefunction. This could have big implications for quantum computing!
This leads us to Winger's cat (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend ). In the novel Timelike Infinity (great series btw), the Ultimate Observer is claimed to be the consciousness at the end of universe that collapses all entangled wave functions. Note the word "entangled" ... like a ball of yarn. The ultimate observer is a cat with a cosmic ball of yarn tracing back the histories of every particle.
Wave function collapse isn't caused by an observer, but rather "does the cat care about this?"
Also explains the purring. Waveform collapse as all nine cats coalesce for pets.
Depressing that some would call you a kook. Creativity is where new science happens.
I have often been called a kook myself. I feel my Schizoaffevctive disorder is expressed because the quantum state most people express is not the same as mine.
No, but there is only one cat in the entire universe, and it's travelling through time and space (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe)
Do orange cats know they’re orange?
Interesting question. Cats apparently have "dichromatic" vision, and orange is among the colors that they basically can't distinguish from grey.
I have an orange male. He's awesome, and he doesn't leave anything on the table as far as cognitive ability goes. He's just very wrapped up in his important cat business that mostly resolves around territory, chipmunks and hanging out with his enemies.
My cat desperately meowed at me this morning to go outside to hang out with her enemies, which I denied her request. She brought a very much alive and unharmed chipmunk home the other day which was booking it around our great room until we corralled him outside with a broom. The live bird incident was even more dramatic. It’s like having a mischievious goblin living in your house. But she does keep the mice from coming in during the winter!
My parents' cat delivered a live baby bunny to the entrance hallways in the middle of my pre-wedding dinner. Once released the thing unfroze and zoomed under some baskets. It was an all-hands-on-deck exercise to corral both the terrified bunny, as well as the over-excited large dog who "wanted to get to know it".
“ Arhgap36 is known to cause developmental problems in other animals when it is over- or under-functioning. But it seems that in orange cats, the gene is overexpressed only in developing and mature pigment cells called melanocytes.”
This doesn’t make sense… if thousands of anecdotal reports in cats specifically report otherwise? And if it’s known to not be limited to melanocytes in other mammalian species?
people are very good at seeing their pets conforming to their expectations, whether that is scientifically true or not :)
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dog-breed-individual-beh...
> Breed offers little predictive value for individuals, explaining just 9% of variation in behavior.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0639
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-dog-breed-s... (here note how big the overlap is between breeds for most traits, and clumpiness is rare, but present)
Only an anecdote, but our orange cat doesn't really conform to any of the stereotypes. He so smart he taught himself how to open doors.
Another anecdata - my cat growing up was orange, and he was plenty smart. He was very relaxed/chill but would come when called and was an excellent hunter of the house mice.
His mom was a very intelligent calico (she communicated with people impressively well), and his dad was an unknown feral cat, so I think his smart-cat genes were more noticeable than whatever correlates with orange.
So did my orange. He learned to open doors so he can maybe get some food.
He doesn't play with any of the cat toys (our other cat loves those and begs to play), is barely active and only runs (his whole belly jiggles side-to-side when he's running) after his dental treats which we throw so he can get some exercise.
He's an odd ball for sure. Goofy, loving. A little chubby, but the vet says it is probably fine considering his laziness and he is healthy otherwise (knock-wood).
I LOVE MY ORANGE CAT LOL
There's the "my anecdote trumps those scientists facts" guy. Never fails.
Humans carry this GTPase as well. GTP is energy source of receptors called G protein coupled receptors. They are about 750 these and many of them are catecholamine receptors, like the serotonin and dopamine receptors.
Humans also carry this gene. https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q6ZRI8/entry
In humans, both DNA and RNA are mostly expressed in the brain and in the endocrine system.
https://www.proteinatlas.org/ENSG00000147256-ARHGAP36/tissue
For cats it very well may be different. Genes do not express activity the same indifferent species and they’re definitely not the same in different parts of the body. Genes can express RNA in one part of the body and more DNA and another part.
But I think this deletion is really about how it affects the methylation the gene.
Wait until you find out about the thousands of anecdotal reports from parents about “sugar rush” in their kids- also without foundation
Now we need a paper about how black cats are secretly red and tabby.
(and you can see it on them in bright sunshine, perfect black cats are not, they exhibit both stripes and reddishness)
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60 years of dissecting fluffy orange kittens is a lot of fluffy orange kittens. =(
Good news: Genetic research does not involve direction.
Source: I have had my genome sequence. I was not dissected.
They did hurt some cats. You cannot do RNA sequencing without looking at tissue samples:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222...
"We first performed RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) on skin tissues obtained from the auricles of different adult calico cats (#19, #20, and #22, females, precise ages unknown)"
Auricles are the earlobes.
"We then analyzed multiple skin tissues obtained from a young calico cat that died of unknown causes (#01, female, 3 weeks old) "
"A) Expression levels of ARHGAP36 and IGSF1 in cat auricles (left) and skin tissues (right). RNA-seq data were obtained in small auricle pieces of different coat colors derived from different cats (left) and in skin samples of different coat colors derived from a single calico cat (#01) (right)."
Biological samples Domestic cat blood Inakazu Dog & Cat Kashii Hospital https://www.inakazu-vet.com/ Domestic cat ovary Cat clinics in Japan N/A Domestic cat auricular Cat clinics in Japan N/A
stray cats are fixed and have ears clipped in several countries so you have an excess of those tissues hanging around no matter what
First, it still hurts the cats.
Second, they clipped the cats ears at specific places because they needed different color hair follicle samples. They describe it in the paper.
Why would you need to dissect kittens for a gene study?
Dissected cats indeed make for terrible jeans. Very kitsch.
You would make a terrible Igor
I would make several great Igors.
Marry an Olga and name all your children the same.