cats

I swear, I wasn't planning on a cat kick, but this was too good not to share. IBM has a supercomputer that model's a cat's brain.

According to a Popular Science article, the IBM Blue Gene, the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world to date, uses 144 terabytes of ram to simulate a cat's cerebral cortex, which is based on 1 billion neurons and 1 trillian synapses. They had previously simulated a full rat brain in 2007, but have only simulated 1% of the human cerebral cortex.

With the simulated cat brain running about 100 times slower than the real thing, I don't think we're in danger of a Terminator cat any time soon. But just wait til it learns how to use it's "soliciting purr."

However, there is another team of researchers working on the Blue Brain project, according to the same article, which has a digital rat's brain's creating self-organizing neurological patterns. So maybe the first Terminator will be a rat.

Have you ever thought that your cat really is evil, and is actively manipulating you to do it's bidding?

Science says that it is. Dr Karen McComb of the Centre for Mammal Vocal Communication Research at the University of Sussex has proof.

A BBC News report spoke to Dr. McComb, who stated that it appears that cats "learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans." According to the same report, studies have found that a domestic cat's cries are similar to that of human babies, and that's a sound humans are highly sensitive to.

"The cry embedded within the purr" study was published in the journal Current Biology in July and claims that cats actually exploit humans into caring for them, especially when it comes to filling those food dishes. The abstract states that "even individuals with no experience of owning cats judged the 'solicitation' purrs to be more urgent. "

How long before someone synthesizes those sounds to control humans? I'd write more, but someone's dish is empty, and I feel compelled to fill it.