David Grimm

2 months ago | science.org | David Grimm

In her final moments, Consort Xiao’s thoughts turned to cats. A concubine of the third emperor of China’s Tang dynasty, she clashed with another royal consort, Wu Zetian, who eventually became empress in the middle of the seventh century. Later, Zetian accused Xiao of witchcraft, ordering her hands and feet cut off and the rest of her dumped into a large wine jar. Before she died, Xiao issued a chilling threat: “In my next life, may I be reborn as a cat, and Wu Zetian as a mouse.

Dec 10, 2024 | science.org | David Grimm

Just a week after Donald Trump won his first term as U.S. president in 2016, a former Republican strategist named Anthony Bellotti took to a podium on Capitol Hill to denounce “painful, bizarre, and wasteful experiments” on animals. The rhetoric was typical of animal rights organizations, but Bellotti was the head of a new kind of advocacy group: a self-described “taxpayer watchdog” called the White Coat Waste Project.

Nov 8, 2024 | science.org | David Grimm

A long-running battle over the future of former research chimpanzees is finally over for 23 chimps. Yesterday, officials at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the primates—who have spent most of their lives at the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico—will be moved to Chimp Haven, a federal chimpanzee sanctuary in Louisiana. “It’s been a long time coming,” says Chimp Haven’s president, Rana Smith.

Oct 3, 2024 | science.org | Sarah Crespi |David Grimm |Ariana Remmel

Berlinerinheart/Shutterstock First up this week, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how cats think about their own bodies. Do cats think of themselves as a liquid, as much the internet appears to believe? New experiments suggest they may—but only in one dimension. Next, freelance producer Ariana Remmel is joined by Ted Schultz, a research entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution, to discuss the evolution of ant-fungus farming. It turns out, ants and fungus...

Sep 17, 2024 | science.org | David Grimm

Cats are liquids—at least according to a running joke on the internet, where videos abound of supposedly solid pet felines oozing under doors, spilling into vases, and pouring through impossibly small holes. Even Google’s artificial intelligence overview says kitties can be classified as fluids. (Take that one for what it’s worth.)But do cats think of themselves as liquidlike entities that can slip through nearly any opening?