The New York Times science section has a delightful story on a comprehensive new study on why cats land on their feet. This is something humans have theorized about but still haven’t solved, though the new study sheds more light:

“The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck,” Dr. Higurashi said.
Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the “legs in, legs out” model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says.

I think this story is a great juxtaposition to a certain crowd’s rapid adoption of LLM-based “artificial intelligence” which offers users advice, guidance, and technical help merely by guessing which word should come next.

There is so much we don’t know about our world and ourselves, and that lack of knowledge is still embedded in these pseudo-thinking machines.