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This will be the last Caturday felid for a while because I’ll be in the air heading to Africa a week from today.  I’ll be gone for a month, and don’t know how often I’ll have internet.  However, Matthew has vowed to continue Hili’s daily dialogue.

Cat posts will resume when I return. As always, I do my best.

The first item today reports a well-cited cat but also demonstrates the weakness of the scientific citation system against scams.  The article below (see also this article from ZME Science)  is from the website of Reese Richardson, a “a PhD candidate working in metascience and computational biology at Northwestern University.”

Click to read how Reese used this scam to get his cat to have a huge rate of citation as author of scientific papers:

Reese saw the ad above on Google Scholar and it turned out to advertise a service that “helped” scientists to manufacture fake citations of their papers—for a price. As Richardson notes:

The advertisement links to several success stories consisting of unredacted “before” and “after” screenshots of clients’ Google Scholar profiles. These clients had apparently bought anywhere between 50 and 500 citations each. Of 18 apparent previous clients, 11 still had active Google Scholar profiles that we could visit. All identifiable clients were affiliated with Indian universities except for two: one client affiliated with a university in Oman and one client in the United States. Although the advertisement also mentions Scopus, we did not find evidence of this company successfully boosting these clients’ Scopus citation counts.

Here’s how it worked:

How was this company so effective at manipulating citation counts? For some clients, a wealth of citations came from dozens of papers in the same suspicious journal. These were probably papers on which the company had sold authorship. In one instance, the highest numbered reference in the text of the paper was Reference 40, while the reference list extended up to Reference 53. References 48 through 53 were to the client.

For most other clients, the scheme was more brazen. Inspecting citations to these clients revealed dozens of papers authored by such celebrated names as Pythagoras, Galileo, Taylor and Kolmogorov. The papers were not published in any journal or pre-print server, only uploaded as PDF files to ResearchGate, the academic social networking site. They had since been deleted from ResearchGate, but Google Scholar kept them indexed. Although the abstracts contain text relevant to their titles, the rest of the paper was usually complete mathematical gibberish. We quickly recognized that these papers had been generated by Mathgen (a few years back, Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé flagged hundreds of ostensibly peer-reviewed papers generated by Mathgen and its relative SCIgen).

At this realization, this company’s citation-boosting procedure fell into sharp focus:

1. Get contracted by a client.
2. Auto-generate several nonsense papers with Mathgen [Optional: change the titles and abstracts to something more plausible for the citation context].
3. Insert citations to several of the client’s papers at a random point in the nonsense paper.
4. Upload the nonsense papers to ResearchGate.
5. Wait for Google Scholar to index the nonsense papers and their citations to the client.
6. Congratulate the client on their newfound academic clout [Optional: delete the nonsense papers from ResearchGate].

The upshot: Richardson, knowing how to do this for free, decided to make Larry, his grandmother’s cat, a highly cited researcher.  In fact, for a short while Larry was the most highly-cited cat in the world. Here he is with Reese’s dad (photo from website):

Out of all the cats with human-ish names in our lives, “Larry Richardson” sounded the most like a tweedy academic and thus was a natural candidate for the title of world’s highest cited cat. As far as we could tell, the standing record-holder was F.D.C. Willard, a Siamese cat named Chester whose owner Jack H. Hetherington added him as an author on a physics paper because he had accidentally written the paper in the first person plural (“we, our”) instead of the first person singular (“I, my”). Chester went on to author one more paper and a book chapter under this name, which have since accumulated 107 citations according to Google Scholar. This was the bar to clear.

And so Reese fabricated 12 papers with his cat namesake as author and went through the procedure above, uploading the fake papers to ResearchGate. Eventually, Larry got 132 citations!:

Larry Richardson is officially history’s highest cited cat (according to Google Scholar, at least).

Notice the cat photo, which should have been a giveaway:

And the point:

Of course, this isn’t about making a cat a highly cited researcher. Our efforts (about an hour of non-automated work) were to make the same point as the authors of this aptly titled pre-print: Google Scholar is manipulatable. Despite the conspicuous vulnerabilities of Google Scholar (and ResearchGate), the quantitative metrics calculated by these services are routinely used to evaluate scientists.

Of course revealing the scam had the predictable consequences: Google removed all of Larry’s citations, though not the fake papers in which he was cited. As Reese says, “Larry held the title of world’s highest cited cat for exactly one week.”  Who knows how many other fake cat authors lurk in the crannies of Google Scholar?

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Here’s a video from FB of an agile cat. It didn’t make it through the 5 cm (about two-inch) slot, but simply jumped over the whole apparatus.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sydney Chaton (@sydneychat_officiel)

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As you’ve seen on this site several times, cats sometimes take up a life of crime, purloining socks, toys, shoes, and even underwear, and stashing the goods or bringing them home. The Guardian takes up the vexing questions of Why Cats Steal (click on screenshot below):

The answer: “We don’t know”:

The thieves went for particular items. Day after day, they roamed the neighbourhood and returned home to dump their loot. Before long they had amassed an impressive haul: socks, underpants, a baby’s cardigan, gloves and yet more socks.

It’s not unusual for cats to bring in dead or petrified mice and birds, but turning up with random objects is harder to explain. Researchers suspect a number of causes, but tend to agree on one point: the pilfered items are not presents.\

“We are not sure why cats behave like this,” says Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a museum in Leiden. “All around the world there are cats doing this, yet it has never been studied.” He now hopes that will change.

Apparently a cat mom can even teach their offspring to steal, something that’s new to me:

The clothing crime spree, perpetrated this year by a mother and her two offspring in the small town of Frigiliana in Spain, has made neighbourly interactions somewhat awkward for their keeper, Rachel Womack. But for scientists such as Hiemstra, it has provided fresh impetus to study the animals. “I want to know exactly why they do it,” he says. “And documenting cases like this could be the start of more research in the future.”

And theft can be on a grand (larceny) scale:

More pressing for Womack is how to return the stolen stuff. Daisy, Dora and Manchita can bring in more than 100 items a month. One recent arrival was a little stuffed bear. Before that, a baby’s shoe. Returning the items, without knowing the rightful owners, isn’t proving easy. “She’s just annoyed,” says Geene. “There are so many, she doesn’t know how to give them back.”

The Frigiliana three are repeat offenders, but they are not the only cats to be rumbled. Charlie, a rescue cat from Bristol, was dubbed the most prolific cat burglar in Britain after bringing home plastic toys, clothes pegs, a rubber duck, glasses and cutlery. His owner, Alice Bigge, once woke to a plastic diplodocus, one of many nabbed from a nearby nursery, next to her head on the pillow. It reminded her of the infamous scene in The Godfather. She puts the items on a wall outside for owners to reclaim.

Another cat, Dusty from San Mateo in California, had more than 600 known thefts, once returning with 11 items on one night. His haul included Crocs, a baseball cap and a pair of swimming trunks. The bra found in the house was fortunately spotted on a video of Dusty coming in. In a feat of accidental social commentary, another cat, Cleo from Texas, came home with a computer mouse.

Several theories are floated, including cats liking the smell, disliking the smell and wanting to remove stinky objects form their territories, looking for attention, engaging in mock hunting, or simply playing.  I can see how to test some of these theories, but not all, and the ultimate explanation is untestable:

Jemma Forman, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex who has studied cats playing fetch, agrees that the pets do not come bearing gifts. She says: “When it comes to cats, normally the explanation is they’re doing it for themselves.”

That’s a bit tautological, as there must be some “reason” embedded in the cat’s neurons, but it could be inaccessible.

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From Letters of Note, here’s a cat-related missive from the famous Nikola Tesla of electricity fame.

I must tell you a strange and unforgettable experience that stayed with me all my life. . .

It happened that one day the cold was drier than ever before. People walking in the snow left a luminous trail behind them, and a snowball thrown against an obstacle gave a flare of light like a loaf of sugar cut with a knife. In the dusk of the evening, as I stroked [my cat] Macak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.

My father was a very learned man; he had an answer for every question. But this phenomenon was new even to him. “Well,” he finally remarked, “this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.”

My mother seemed charmed. “Stop playing with this cat,” she said. “He might start a fire.” But I was thinking abstractedly. Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded. Here I was, only three years old and already philosophising.

However stupefying the first observation, something still more wonderful was to come. It was getting darker, and soon the candles were lighted. Macak took a few steps through the room. He shook his paws as though he were treading on wet ground. I looked at him attentively. Did I see something or was it an illusion? I strained my eyes and perceived distinctly that his body was surrounded by a halo like the aureola of a saint!

I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvellous night on my childish imagination. Day after day I have asked myself “what is electricity?” and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since that time and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.

Nikola Tesla
Letter to Pola Fotić4
23rd July 1938

This reminds me of a line from the best cat poem ever written, “For I will consider my cat Jeoffry,” by Christopher Smart:

For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.

Read that poem if you haven’t yet. It may have been written in the throes of mental illness, as Smart was confined in an asylum when he wrote it, but I haven’t seen a better paean to cats.

h/t: Ginger K., Gregory

We have one more batch of photos in the tank, but fortunately we have Tara Tanaka’s videos.

Here’s what Tara said about this video of wood storks (Mycteria americana) in a rookery.  The baby is adorable:

We got a sit on top kayak that I can shoot from and I’ve been going out every couple of week at sunrise and shooting video.  Here’s one from a month ago.  The rookery is SO loud!

Venus’s atmosphere has drawn a lot of attention lately. In particular, the consistent discovery of phosphine in its clouds points to potential biological sources. That, in turn, has resulted in numerous suggested missions, including floating a balloon into the atmosphere or having a spacecraft scoop down and suck up atmospheric samples. But a team of engineers led by Jeffrey Balcerski, now an adjunct at Kent State University but then part of the Ohio Aerospace Institute, came up with a different idea years ago – use floating sensor platforms shaped like leaves to collect a wide variety of data throughout Venus’ atmosphere.

The Lofted Environmental and Atmospheric Venus Sensors (or LEAVES) project was funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program in 2018. The mission design is simple enough: design lightweight platforms with a wide surface area, attach some low-cost and weight sensors to them, release them from a mothership transiting into orbit around Venus, and let those platforms float down through the Venusian atmosphere over the course of a few hours, all the while sending back atmospheric, chemical, and temperature data to the mothership.

There are a few enabling technologies behind the idea. The first is a lightweight yet robust and deployable structure that could support a platform of sensors and not be destroyed by Venus’s notoriously hellish environment. Designing this structure required understanding expected flight times and geolocation requirements, as well as the requirement that the system must be trackable by orbital radar in order to communicate back to the mothership. The resulting design resembles the famous inverted pyramid at the Louvre.

Venus is one of the most interesting planets in the solar system – and has captured Fraser’s imagination.

Inside that structure, the second enabling technology sits—harsh environment sensors designed to operate in Venus’s extreme environments. Chemical, pressure, and electrical sensors have undergone extensive development work over the past few years, and some are approaching readiness for use on Venus. They are also lightweight, allowing the structure to descend slowly, which is necessary to complete its mission goals.

After receiving the NIAC Phase I grant, the team led by Dr. Balcerski got to work modeling LEAVES’ structure and mission design. They quickly realized that delivery methodology and a system’s light weight would be critical to future missions. As such, they modeled depositing a series of upwards of 100 LEAVES throughout Venus’ atmosphere, each of which would be networked back to the mothership that deposited them as part of its planned orbital maneuver. They also thought there were several planned Venus missions, such as DaVINCI, which could easily take LEAVES on as a secondary payload with no real risk to mission success or uptime, as the LEAVES would fall and be destroyed by the lower Venusian atmosphere in a matter of hours.

But those hours of data, relayed back to the mothership and then on to Earth, could provide invaluable insights into the inner workings of Venus’s atmosphere. LEAVES would be able to reach a wide altitude range—it is estimated to operate between 100 km and 30 km in altitude. It could also be spread literally all over the world, allowing for a more complete picture of the Venusian atmosphere than other mission designs, which would only capture a small vertical slice of the atmosphere.

Venus’s environmental is rough on technology, to say the least. Fraser discusses the new technologies that could one day survive on its surface.

Given the potential impact of what we might find in the Venusian atmosphere, any mission designs that allow us to capture a large amount of information about a wide swath of it would be welcome. Dr. Balcerski and his colleagues think they have advanced the LEAVES concept to a Technology Readiness Level of 3-4. However, they haven’t yet received further support for LEAVES, and development appears to be on hold. But, given the increasing interest in exploring the Venusian atmosphere, perhaps it’s time to look at this lightweight, inexpensive way of doing so again.

Learn More:
Balcerski et al. – LEAVES: Lofted Environmental and Atmospheric Venus Sensors
UT – There are Mysteries at Venus. It’s Time for an Astrobiology Mission
UT – Scientists Have Re-Analyzed Their Data and Still See a Signal of Phosphine at Venus. Just Less of it
UT – The Clouds of Venus Could Support Life

Lead Image:
Artist’s depiction of several LEAVES falling through Venus’s atmosphere.
Credit – Balcerski et al.

The post Floating LEAVES Could Characterize Venus’s Atmosphere appeared first on Universe Today.

It’s not always possible to observe the night sky from the surface of the Earth. The blocking effects of the atmosphere mean we sometimes need to put telescopes out into space. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is one such telescopes and it has just completed its 25th year of observations. To celebrate, NASA have just released 25 never-before-seen images of various celestial objects in x-rays. The collection includes images showing the region around black holes, giant clouds of hot gas and extreme magnetic fields. Sadly though, NASA is planning on shutting down the mission to save budget so best to enjoy the images while you can. 

Back in the 1970’s NASA received a proposal from Riccardo Giacconi and Harvey Tananbaum to launch an x-ray telescope into space. An orbiting observatory was necessary because the Earth’s atmosphere blocks x-rays from reaching the surface. The x-rays Giacconi and Tananbaum were hoping to capture come from some of the hottest and most energetic places in the universe.  The proposal eventually became the Chandra X-Ray Telescope and it was chosen to be part of NASA’s Great Observatories along with the Hubble Space Telescope with each instrument exploring different wavelengths. 

Artist’s illustration of Chandra

Chandra was launched in July 1999 from the space shuttle Columbia and is undoubtedly one of the most successful and powerful x-ray telescopes ever built. It was named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar the nobel prize winning astrophysicist. It orbits the Earth in a highly elliptical orbit varying between 16,000 kilometres and 133,000 kilometres (almost a third of the distance to the Moon) altitude so it can operate for most of its time above the radiation belts around Earth. 

The strange shape of the telescope is necessary due to the high energy of x-rays. In a conventional telescope, the mirror is placed perpendicular to the incoming light so it strikes it head on before being reflected back up the tube. If the same approach was tried with high energy x-rays they would just fly straight through the mirror. Instead, incoming x-rays catch a mirror at an angle, deflecting them a little to their focus.  The first reflection surface is a paraboloid and the second a hyperboloid. The arrangement is known as the Wolter 1 configuration. 

It is important to study x-rays because it gives us an opportunity to study high energy events. Supernova remnants, galaxy clusters and neutron star mergers are just some of the events we can study. Before Chandra, high altitude balloons had been used to try and get above much of the atmosphere for x-ray astronomy but Chandra was a real game changer in helping to understand the high energy physics in the cosmos. 

A composite image of the remnant of supernova 1181. A spherical bright nebula sits in the middle surrounded by a field of white dotted stars. Within the nebula several rays point out like fireworks from a central star. G. Ferrand and J. English (U. of Manitoba), NASA/Chandra/WISE, ESA/XMM, MDM/R.Fessen (Dartmouth College), Pan-STARRS

With 25 years of successful operation, Chandra continues to be used in conjunction with other observatories such as James Webb Space Telescope, the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer and of course Hubble. 25 years on though and to celebrate, NASA has released a new image set from nearly 25,000 observations and they reveal objects in stunning new detail. 

It’s difficult to pick a favourite among the images but I think the Crab Nebula is one of my favourites. Visually it looks pretty unimpressive but switch the view to x-rays and it suddenly looks stunning. As a star that has exploded at the end of its life the true majestic nature of this supernova remnant is unveiled. 

Despite 25 years of superb operation, a letter written by Patrick Slane, the director of Chandra explain budget challenges may mean Chandra will be shutting down. Such a shame for such a successful observatory that really has changed our view of the universe. 

The full image can be seen at : 25 Images to Celebrate NASA’s Chandra 25th Anniversary

The post Update your Desktop Wallpaper with 25 New Images from Chandra appeared first on Universe Today.

Researchers have achieved a significant breakthrough that could lead to better -- and greener -- agricultural chemicals and everyday products. Using a process that combines natural enzymes and light, the team developed an eco-friendly way to precisely mix fluorine, an important additive, into chemicals called olefins -- hydrocarbons used in a vast array of products, from detergents to fuels to medicines. This groundbreaking method offers an efficient new strategy for creating high-value chemicals with potential applications in agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, renewable fuels, and more.

Researchers developed a machine-learning framework that can predict a key property of heat dispersion in materials that is up to 1,000 times faster than other AI methods, and could enable scientists to improve the efficiency of power generation systems and microelectronics.

Researchers modeled the impact of using anaerobic digestion to produce renewable natural gas from grassy biomass in different settings and from varying perspectives, analysis that helps flesh out the system's potential.