Japan’s Hayabusa 2 mission has revealed another "snowman" asteroid — a pair of asteroids attached with a narrow neck. The contact binary could help shed light on planet formation.
The post Hayabusa 2 Completes Flyby Past Asteroid Torifune appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Cancer has a dirty trick: it can put itself to sleep. When tumor cells slip into a kind of biological hibernation, they become hard to kill, shrugging off treatment and lying low until conditions improve, then waking up and bringing the disease back. For decades, researchers have struggled to shut down this hiding strategy without causing serious harm elsewhere in the body. A team in Switzerland has now built a molecule that flips on and off with flashes of light, giving scientists a precise new way to probe, and possibly disrupt, the way sleeping cancer cells hide.
Behind this cellular sleep state, at least in certain cancers, sits a protein called the glucocorticoid receptor, a sensor inside cells that reacts to stress hormones. When it switches on, it can push cancer cells, especially in some solid tumors such as lung cancer, into a drug-resistant, dormant state. The obvious fix would be to destroy the receptor outright, but there is a catch: the same receptor does important jobs all over the body, including calming inflammation. Removing it everywhere would cause real damage. What was needed was a way to hit the receptor inside a tumor and leave the rest of the body alone.
That is what the team set out to build. Their solution, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a class of molecules called photoPROTACs: drug-like compounds engineered to destroy the stress hormone receptor, but only when a specific color of light switches them on. Shine the right light on them, and they go to work. Keep them in the dark, and they stay idle.
It helps to know what a PROTAC is. A PROTAC is a molecule that grabs onto a specific protein inside a cell and tags it for destruction by the cell’s own waste-disposal system. It works like slapping a “delete me” sticky note on an unwanted protein. PROTACs have stirred huge excitement in medicine because they can eliminate proteins that ordinary drugs cannot touch.
Conventional PROTACs have a problem: they are always on. Once taken, they work throughout the entire body, destroying their target in cancer cells and healthy cells alike. For a receptor this important to normal health, that is a dealbreaker.
To get around it, the team embedded a light-sensitive part directly into the PROTAC molecule. By adding a chemical structure that physically changes shape depending on the wavelength of light hitting it, they created a molecular switch. In one shape, called the E-form, the molecule has the right geometry to do its job and destroy the receptor. In the other, the Z-form, it bends into a configuration that leaves it far less active. The switch runs both ways: one wavelength turns the molecule on, another turns it off.
Researchers built and tested several versions of these light-switchable molecules, hunting for the best balance of stability and responsiveness. Two lead compounds, KH-5-306 and KH-5-309, stood out. Both flipped almost completely between their active and inactive shapes under different wavelengths of light and showed no signs of wearing out after repeated exposure.
Inside cells, both compounds destroyed the stress hormone receptor in their active E-form at very low doses. Switched to the inactive Z-form, the effect dropped sharply, though the inactive form still held on to some activity. Because the Z-form naturally drifts back toward the active E-form at body temperature, researchers kept it locked in place during experiments by hitting the cells with brief bursts of ultraviolet light every 30 minutes, a lab-only workaround they confirmed did not harm the cells or disturb the biology under study, and not a method meant for patients.
Additional tests confirmed the receptor destruction ran through the cell’s normal disposal machinery: when a separate inhibitor blocked that machinery, the photoPROTACs stopped working. The compounds also left a closely related receptor alone, even at higher doses, a sign the molecules were hitting their intended target and not damaging look-alikes. And the effect proved temporary. When the active compound was washed away after 12 hours, receptor levels started climbing back within 24.
With the chemistry checked, researchers moved to a test closer to real medicine. They took human lung cancer cells and treated them with dexamethasone, a common steroid that switches on the glucocorticoid receptor and nudges these cells into a dormancy-like state. That setup mirrors a real problem: dexamethasone is routinely given to cancer patients to manage inflammation and treatment side effects, yet it may quietly push tumor cells toward this drug-resistant sleep.
After confirming that dexamethasone triggered the expected dormancy response, the team tested whether the lead photoPROTAC, KH-5-309, could reverse it. Cells treated with the active E-form saw the dormancy-linked gene activity roll back toward normal, and a sweep across thousands of genes confirmed the shift toward a more active state. By contrast, the inactive Z-form left those genes essentially untouched, behaving in this experiment as a neutral control on par with no treatment at all.
Researchers are candid about the limits. The biggest obstacle to reaching real patients is the kind of light involved. The wavelengths that switch these compounds on do not travel far into living tissue, so the current version could not reach a tumor buried deep in the body. Developing compounds that respond to longer, redder wavelengths, such as near-infrared light that penetrates tissue more deeply, is a key goal for future work rather than a solved problem.
For now, the strongest promise is in the lab: studying cancer biology in cell cultures, tissue slices, and lab-grown miniature organs called organoids, where light can be aimed precisely and repeatedly. Those tools give scientists a way to study how stress hormone signaling drives cancer behavior that existing drugs cannot match.
Cancer’s ability to play dead has long been one of the most frustrating barriers to lasting cures. This is early-stage work, years from any use in the clinic, but a well-aimed flash of light that disrupts cancer’s hiding strategy is the kind of proof-of-concept result that hands researchers a fresh grip on a stubborn problem.
Scientists have found evidence that gravitational waves from a spectacular black hole collision carry signals from the very edge of the newly formed black hole. If confirmed by future observations, the discovery could provide an entirely new way to investigate what happens in the immediate vicinity of a black hole without ever observing it directly.
In a new study, the researchers analyzed an exceptionally strong gravitational wave event known as GW250114. They identified a "direct wave," a subtle feature of the total gravitational wave signal predicted by theory but never previously detected in real data. The signal appears to contain information from extremely close to the black hole's event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.
The findings, published June 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that gravitational wave observatories may eventually allow astronomers to probe regions that have remained inaccessible since black holes were first predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.
Although astronomers have photographed the glowing material surrounding some supermassive black holes and have detected dozens of black hole mergers through gravitational waves, the event horizon itself has remained frustratingly difficult to study.
Unlike ordinary light, gravitational waves are tiny ripples in space-time produced when massive objects accelerate. They pass almost undisturbed through the universe, carrying information about violent cosmic events that would otherwise remain hidden.
According to study co-author Sizheng Ma, a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, the newly identified signal offers a rare glimpse of what happens immediately after two black holes collide.
"When two black holes merge, they violently shake space-time itself," Ma told Live Science. "For a brief moment, the region very close to the newly formed black hole's horizon is swept into a fast, fading swirl."
Ma explained that the direct wave is the portion of the gravitational wave signal produced near the horizon and carries the imprint of that motion outward through space.
"That is why it is so interesting," he said. "It may let us 'listen' to what happens near the horizon, a region we cannot see directly with light."
The team focused on GW250114, a black hole merger detected on Jan. 14, 2025, by the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.
"Our earlier theoretical work predicted that black hole mergers should produce a direct-wave signal from the near-horizon region," Ma said. "The big question was whether this effect could actually be seen in real data."
GW250114 turned out to provide exactly the conditions needed to test that prediction.
"It was strong enough, clean enough, and close enough to the theoretical situation where this signal should be visible," he said.
To search for the elusive feature, the researchers first removed the best-understood part of the gravitational wave signal, which comes from the newly formed black hole settling down after the merger. Then, they examined the remaining data to determine whether it consisted only of detector noise or contained another physical signal.
"What we found was striking," Ma said. "The remaining signal followed the expected rhythm and fading pattern of a wave shaped by the region very close to the final black hole's horizon."
The team concluded that the leftover signal matches the behavior expected for a direct wave predicted by previous theoretical studies.
The researchers stressed that their findings do not reveal what lies inside a black hole. Instead, they're providing a new observational tool for investigating the region immediately outside the event horizon.
"The gravitational wave data appear to carry an imprint from very close to the newly formed black hole's horizon — the famous point of no return," Ma said.
He explained that the measurements are consistent with space-time near the horizon being rapidly dragged around by the spinning black hole while the signal fades because of the intense gravitational field.
"For us, the exciting message is that gravitational waves may be giving us a new way to study the edge of a black hole using real observational data," Ma said.
Ma believes the method could eventually become useful for exploring ideas such as quantum gravity — which seeks to unite Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum mechanics — or the black hole information paradox, the longstanding puzzle of whether information that falls into a black hole is truly lost. However, it cannot test those questions directly yet.
"If quantum effects, or any deviations from the standard black-hole picture, leave a measurable imprint there, then direct waves could, in principle, help us search for them in the future," he said.
The researchers cautioned that the discovery is based on a single gravitational wave event. While GW250114 provided exceptionally favorable conditions, much stronger evidence will come only if similar signals are found in many additional black hole mergers.
"There are two main directions," Ma said. "The first is theory."
Current models capture the essential physics but remain simplified, and more realistic descriptions of black hole mergers will be needed.
"The second is observation," he added. "This result comes from one exceptionally loud and clean event, so the strongest confirmation would come from seeing the same kind of pattern in other black hole mergers."
As gravitational wave observatories continue to improve and detect increasing numbers of mergers, researchers hope to determine whether direct waves are a universal feature of black hole collisions.
"If the pattern appears repeatedly in the way general relativity predicts," Ma said, "direct waves could become a new way to study black hole horizons or the regions very close to them, and to test Einstein's theory in one of the most extreme environments in the universe."
If future observations confirm the team's results, scientists may have gained something they have sought for decades: a direct observational window into the very edge of a black hole.
See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!
Meet Cygnus, the Swan, a high-flying constellation that looks like its namesake and has a rich mythological history.
The post Meet the Cygnus, the High-Flying Swan appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
A daring mission will attempt to reach and save a key astrophysics observatory in low Earth orbit.
The post Mission Launches to Rescue Swift Observatory appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
June global sea surface temperatures have climbed to record highs, prompting concerns over extreme weather, flooding, sea level rise and stress to global ocean ecosystems.
The record, announced by the European Union's Copernicus Earth observation program on July 1, surpassed the previous record set in June 2024, with experts warning that more temperature records will likely be set over the coming months.
"Current conditions could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory," Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), said in a statement. "With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”
The record temperature was set on June 21, when the Copernicus Climate Change Service recorded global ocean surface temperatures of 20.86 degrees Celsius (69.55 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record temperature of 20.83 C (69.49 F) set in 2023 and 2024. This measurement was corroborated by the Copernicus Marine Service, an independent dataset that reported temperatures of 21.0 C (69.8 F).
The recent sea surface heating did not occur evenly across the globe. In some areas, such as the Mediterranean, temperatures in June were up to 8 C (14.4 F) higher than average for the period from 1990 to 2020, as per data recorded on June 29, according to the European Space Agency.
The most significant rises in temperature were set in the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, bands across the Pacific and off the coasts of Northern Canada.
Warmer ocean temperatures have wide-ranging impacts. "Higher ocean temperatures keep the atmosphere warm for longer, provide extra energy to storms and increase evaporation, thus enhancing the potential for extreme precipitation and flooding," Copernicus Climate Change Service representatives said in the statement. "Ocean warming also contributes to sea level rise and ice melt, and stresses marine ecosystems."
According to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the newly declared El Niño in the Pacific Ocean — the warm phase of a natural climate cycle. This El Niño is likely to reach levels that have not been seen in decades, with more temperature records expected to be set over the coming months as this Pacific heat is injected into an already warming world.
The service added that it remains to be seen whether these temperature spikes are temporary or indicative of longer term trends.
An 11-year-old boy in Ontario, Canada, has died after being bitten by a rabid bat that was resting on his face as he slept. The boy had no obvious bite or scratch marks and didn't show symptoms for the first 19 days after the incident, his doctors report.
While on vacation with his parents at a cottage in northern Ontario in 2024, the boy was woken up in the night by a bat on his nose and mouth, according to a report published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on June 29. His father caught the bat in a cooking pot and released it outside, and because the child had no visible injuries and the bat did not seem to be particularly aggressive, his parents decided not to seek a medical assessment, the report noted.
A few weeks later, the child began to experience tingling, numbness and swelling on the right side of his face. When he was examined at his local hospital his vital signs appeared to be normal, aside from an elevated heart rate and white blood cell count.
The next day, the boy's symptoms worsened: he lost feeling in the right side of his face and his speech was beginning to slur. While waiting in hospital, he developed a fever, confusion, hallucinations and difficulty swallowing, followed by excessive production of saliva.
After four days in intensive care at McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, the child tested positive for rabies, and after five days his brain stem reflexes were absent, indicating a total loss of brain stem function. Seventeen days after admission, following a consultation between his family and medical experts, he was taken off life support and died.
Rabies is a viral disease that primarily affects the central nervous system, according to the CDC. It is mainly spread through bites and scratches from infected animals, with bats accounting for the majority of cases in North America, according to the boy's doctors.
"Bats pose a particular risk because bites or scratches may be small and are easily overlooked, and patients may not recollect or recognize a bat exposure," the medical team wrote in their report.
According to a report in the Journal of Virology in 2013, silver-haired bats (Lasionycteris noctivagans), are responsible for the majority of rabies cases in Canada. Skunks, foxes and raccoons also often carry the disease.
The rabies virus must travel to the brain before symptoms can occur, but once a patient develops symptoms the infection is almost 100% fatal, with most deaths occurring within one to two weeks of symptom development. However, prompt treatment after exposure — including wound cleaning, antibody administration and a series of vaccines — is nearly always effective at preventing the disease, according to the CDC.
Rabies in humans is very rare in North America, with fewer than 10 deaths reported in the U.S. every year, according to the CDC. In Canada, only 28 human fatalities have been reported since 1924, according to the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association. Even so, the boy's doctors have emphasized the importance of prompt medical attention following exposure to bats and other animals that could carry the disease.
"Early recognition of exposure and timely PEP [postexposure prophylaxis] remain the only effective means of rabies prevention," they wrote. "Any direct human contact with a bat, even in the absence of a visible bite or scratch, is an indication for PEP."
They added that rabid bats do not always display the classic symptoms commonly associated with rabies, such as aggressive behavior and frothing at the mouth. "Any direct human contact with [a] bat is considered high risk," they added.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
NASA has awarded contracts to three aerospace companies for four lunar landers to launch in 2028.
The post NASA Announces Four New Lunar Lander Missions for 2028 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
A breakthrough in photonic chips could make large, costly, ultrafast lasers dramatically smaller, leading to portable and affordable imaging, diagnostic and information-processing devices, researchers say.
By using a decades-old overlooked laser architecture, scientists managed to fit an ultrafast laser onto a tiny photonic chip — a chip that uses light, rather than electricity, for computing operations.
In a new study published June 3 in the journal Nature, the team demonstrated that a tiny laser on the photonic chip could deliver 1.05 nanojoules of energy in 147-femtosecond (147 quadrillionths of a second) bursts — thereby competing with the output of laboratory-class ultrafast lasers.
Ultrafast lasers are used in a variety of applications, from precision manufacturing and eye surgery to biological imaging and atomic clocks, but the systems needed to power them tend to take up whole tabletops in labs or factories. Yet the powerful output of these laser pulses made them difficult to miniaturise onto photonic chips.
"For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics," Tobias Kippenberg, a photonics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology(EPFL), said in a statement.
"Our result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked."
Photonic chips manipulate light by using microscopic structures called waveguides — usually in the form of optical fibers or etched cavities — to carry information. They aren't particularly novel, and can be found in fiber-optic communications, medical sensors and lidar systems.
But photonic chips have previously struggled when handling high-powered, ultrafast lasers. That's because they need to contain light to extremely small waveguides, leading the light to interact strongly with itself and destabilizing the laser pulses.
To tackle this problem, the researchers looked at a laser architecture called the Mamyshev oscillator, created in 1998 by Pavel V. Mamyshev, a physicist and engineer at Bell Labs.
This oscillator, which has received little attention in the world of photonic chips, works by placing a nonlinear waveguide between two optical filters. This causes a high-intensity laser pulse to expand into a broader range of colors that can then pass through both filters while weaker light, which can cause laser destabilization, is blocked out. This technique essentially means that a high-intensity laser pulse can be maintained.
Because the Mamyshev oscillator doesn't require extra components to manufacture on a chip, it presents an attractive design for use on photonic chips. And although the laser cavity needed to direct an ultrafast laser is 16.5 inches (42 centimeters) long, it can be folded to occupy around the same area as a match head. This can't be done with conventional fiber-optic-based lasers, often used in photonic chips.
That takes care of the size, but the cost of ultrafast laser systems is another challenge. But because photonic chips can be fabricated using silicon wafers in the same fashion as computer chips, more than 1,000 laser cavities could potentially be produced in a single batch, the researchers said. As such, photonic chips with ultrafast laser capabilities could be produced at scale, in turn reducing manufacturing costs and even expanding their use.
Photonic chips capable of handling ultrafast lasers could, in the future, lead to portable tools for tasks like detecting pollutants or performing advanced medical diagnostics in the field, the researchers noted in the study. The technology also opens the door to smaller atomic clocks that can benefit navigation and future communications.
Everyone's getting back into vinyl these days, whether it's for that hit of nostalgia or because you don't want Spotify feeding you AI slop (vinyl, at the time of writing, does not facilitate AI slop… let us all hope it stays that way). And a new discount from Fluance makes picking up its entry-level turntable even easier.
This is the Fluance RT81, which we called "Easily the best starter turntable you can buy" when we tested it back in 2024. And it's a relatively affordable model even without a discount, designed to offer you the record-playing basics without expensive audiophile features.
But right now, it's 20% off, taking $60 off its already-affordable asking fee to make it just $239.99 (was $299.99) on Amazon.
A warning: turn back now if you're not reading this between 8:25am and 8:25pm ET on Wednesday, June 4 (that's 5:25am - 5:25pm PT, though it's not clear if Fluance will budge the window for Westerners). This discount is available as a Lightning Deal on Amazon, as part of Prime Day deals, so it's only live for a slender 12-hour window.
• Shop more Prime Day deals at Amazon US
Fluance RT81: was $299.99 now $239.99 at Amazon
Turntable discounts aren't hugely common, so any kind of reduction is something that'll turn heads. It's great that the sale is on an entry-level model, lowering the price of entry for prospective vinyl fans a little. And the discount? It's the lowest our trackers have seen… View Deal
Hold the needle a sec: the Fluance RT81 does miss one feature common in entry-level turntables, which you should probably know about before you buy.
The turntable doesn't feature Bluetooth connectivity (which plenty of new spinners do in 2026), so you can't pair it with your JBL speaker to enjoy your tunes, say. Instead, you'll need to connect wired speakers via RCA (those white and red dual cables).
While audiophiles prefer to avoid Bluetooth for record listening, due to the compression inherent in Bluetooth losing some of the detail within the vinyl, it's much more common in entry-level record players. The feature makes it much easier to integrate a player into your home hi-fi set-up if you only own wireless tech.
So it's only worth buying the Fluance RT81 deal if you can fit a wired turntable into your home, or you already have a set of stereo speakers that you want to put to good use.
If that's no issue, you'll find the RT81 a nice, good-looking and convenient starter turntable. It's easy to set-up and use, and it sounds pretty great.
The deal will save you $60 which, admittedly, is about the cost of one record these days, but you've probably inherited a collection of those. Instead, I'd put the money towards one of the best stereo speakers so you can use the Fluance properly.
The refreshed lineup of Dell laptops has turned out to be even better than many of us hoped for, including the return of the XPS line — and right now, Dell's 'Days of Deals' sale is offering even better pricing than the Amazon Prime Day laptop deals I've been seeing.
Right off the top, you have the new Dell 16 Laptop for $499.99 (originally $1029.99), which is a better price for a Windows 11 Home laptop than just about any other model on Amazon that doesn't come with junk hardware inside. Instead, you get an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 250 processor, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD, far better than most sub-$500 laptops on sale for Prime Day.
The Alienware 15 gaming laptop is also just $999.99 for a decently specced sub-$1,000 laptop with updated hardware, something that is very hard to find on Amazon right now.
There's more to explore at Dell.com, and I encourage you to check out their sale if you're in the market for new computer hardware, but I've pulled together my favorite laptop picks and configurations from the sale to help make it easier to find what you're looking for.
AMD Ryzen 7 250 | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 512GB SSD
I always think of the Dell 16 Laptop as the everyday workhorse for remote and hybrid workers. Likewise, If you or your child is off to college this September, then get ahead of the curve with this outstanding deal.View Deal
AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 512GB SSD
The Dell 14 Plus is one of our favorite mid-range Windows laptops thanks to its excellent design and competitive specs. If I were looking for a decent everyday laptop for everything from work to demanding productivity applications, then I'd be very tempted by this deal.View Deal
Intel Core 5 320 | 8GB DDR5 RAM | 512GB SSD
Dell's answer to the Neo comes with a touchscreen display and a special price for students (matching Apple's $599). This is the cheapest XPS 13 yet and one with a smaller-than-A4 footprint.View Deal
Intel Core Ultra 7 258V | 32GB DDR5 RAM | 1TB SSD
Dell ships 32GB of RAM with this laptop and this is the optimal amount of memory for serious productivity/business workloads. 'Between great general computing performance for any college student or executive and long-lasting battery life, it's a solid mid-tier laptop and it's even cheaper than last year!View Deal
Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 | 32GB DDR5 RAM | 512GB SSD
Dell's XPS 13 laptops are always worth keeping an eye out for during Prime Day, as we often see big price cuts for what are some of the best laptops you can currently buy. Right now, one of the biggest discounts you'll find is for this Snapdragon-equipped model, which also features an impressive 32GB of RAM. With a Snapdragon chipset, you'll get great performance and almost unbeatable battery life out of this model.View Deal
Intel Core 5 210H | 16GB DDR5 RAM | 512GB SSD | RTX4050
Save $350 on the Alienware Aurora 15 gaming laptop. This system strikes a sensible balance between gaming proficiency and affordability. For less than $1,000, it's a capable workhorse for both casual and professional tasks.View Deal
Graphics card: GeForce RTX 5060
Processor: Intel Core Ultra 7-240H
RAM: 32GB DDR5
Storage: 1TB
This Alienware Aurora 16 isn't the cheapest laptop on the market, but you're getting an Intel Core Ultra-7 240H chipset, RTX 5060 graphics card, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB SSD - superb specs for 1080p gaming. If you need a decent machine with a premium build, then this is a fantastic choice in the Dell Black Friday in July sale.View Deal
The cat sleeps more. It jumps up onto things less. It takes longer to get comfortable and doesn’t race around the way it used to. This reads as an obvious story: the animal is getting old. It’s natural. It’s expected. Most owners I know accept this narrative without a second thought because it’s tidy and it requires nothing of them.
What veterinary research keeps saying, with increasing insistence, is that the tidy narrative is almost certainly wrong.
Studies consistently find that between 64% and 92% of cats over the age of ten have arthritis. By the time a cat reaches twelve, the figure for osteoarthritis alone is around 90%. In cats older than fourteen, 82% show joint involvement in imaging studies. These are not marginal findings from a single outlier study. They replicate across research institutions and countries.
The gap between those numbers and what most cat owners believe about their pets is enormous. And it exists almost entirely because cats are extraordinarily good at not telling you they are hurting.
This is not stubbornness or stoicism in any meaningful sense. It is evolutionary architecture. Cats occupy an unusual ecological position — they are predators, but they are also prey. A wild cat that signals injury or weakness invites attack. Over millions of years, the ones that survived were the ones that showed nothing.
That instinct does not disappear in a domestic animal sleeping on a heated blanket in a flat in Amsterdam. The cat that is quietly arthritic does not limp dramatically, does not vocalise its pain, does not do anything that reads obviously as suffering. It just… adjusts. It stops jumping to the high shelf. It grooms itself less around the hips. It finds a position and stays in it. To an owner watching casually, this looks indistinguishable from the ordinary changes of age.
Researchers from the University of California Davis and others have noted that owners frequently report these behavioural changes during routine vet visits, describe them as age-related, and don’t flag them as pain indicators — because they don’t know that’s what they are. The cat isn’t complaining. The owner isn’t alarmed. The pain goes unmanaged.
The clinical picture of a cat in chronic pain is subtle, almost by design. The American Animal Hospital Association lists the signs: reduced activity, reluctance to jump, changes in grooming patterns, altered sleep positions, irritability when touched in certain places, and withdrawal from interaction. None of these is dramatic. All of them can be read as “just getting older.”
The distinguishing question a vet will ask is not whether any of these things are happening but whether they represent a change from the cat’s baseline. A cat that has always been calm and low-energy is probably fine. A cat that used to leap to the windowsill every morning and now doesn’t is a different conversation.
There is now a real and expanding range of interventions for feline chronic pain — including newer monoclonal antibody treatments specifically approved for cats — but they require a diagnosis, which requires a vet visit, which requires an owner who suspects something is wrong.
That chain breaks at the first link when owners are operating on the assumption that the slowdown is natural. I find myself thinking about how many cats are spending years in unmanaged pain while their owners interpret the stoicism as contentment. The cat doesn’t complain. The owner assumes it’s fine. Nobody’s lying. But the outcome is the same as if both of them were.
If your cat is over ten and has changed its movement patterns in the last year or two, the veterinary consensus is clear: don’t wait for obvious signals. The species you’re dealing with evolved specifically not to give you any.
The post Most cat owners I know assume their older cat is just slowing down with age — veterinary research suggests up to 92% of cats over ten have arthritis, and most are hiding it appeared first on Space Daily.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
They’re evolving faster than we can stop them
The post How City Rats Are Becoming Resistant to Poison appeared first on Nautilus.
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