M.J. Rose

A lovely little story about some cats and their museum…

by Nick Harris for the British Museum Blog,

The purrrplexing story of the British Museum cats

There are plenty of cats depicted in Museum objects, but did you know that real cats used to live at the Museum? Digital Creative Producer Nick Harris takes us through his podcast on this surprising aspect of the Museum’s history.

This is the story of how the British Museum became a cat haven, and how they eventually came to be on the Museum payroll, thanks in large part to a British Museum cleaner affectionately referred to as the ‘Cat Man’.

The British Museum has been open to the public since 1759 – that’s 258 years! That makes it older than Napoleon (we have one of his death masks, which you should definitely check out), older than the steam locomotive, it even predates the entire industrial revolution. But my favourite thing that the Museum is older than? Sandwiches. Definitely sandwiches.

Why am I talking about the origin date of sandwiches in a blog about cats? Well they’re related, if not immediately obviously. When you’re a Museum employee, you get access to many of the areas the public aren’t allowed to go into, and this is one of my favourite things about working here. Because those areas are littered with outdated signs and staff notices from the Museum’s history. They frequently make little to no sense at first glance, because what they relate to has long since passed, but if you dig a little deeper, they tend to have fantastic stories attached to them. And there’s one in particular that had me so purrrplexed (sorry), that I had to find out more about it. It reads:

In my three years of working at the Museum I’ve never even seen a tin of cat food, let alone an actual cat that could be fed in an official or unofficial cat feeding area. In order to sate my cat-like curiosity I started asking some of the longer serving members of staff if they knew anything about the Museum cats.

They did. It turns out that between the 1970s and 1990s the Museum had between 4 and 7 cats – depending on what year we’re talking about – kept to deter mice and rats…”

For the rest, plus a podcast on this and more photos, click here.

If you’re into space, you’re going to be into this recent news — but it’s still a mystery as to whether this “life” is or is not presently living away its days on this moon or not. However, just the fact that it MIGHT BE is quite astonishing, don’t you think?

Moon geysers

From Motherboard,

We Have Strong Evidence Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Can Support Microbial Alien Life

by Becky Ferreira

“Scientists find potential evidence of methanogenesis, a biological process, on Saturn’s moon Enceladus—which means methane-breathing aliens could be chilling there.
The ocean interior of Saturn’s moon Enceladus may have the “temperatures and chemical energy sources necessary for habitable conditions,” according to new research published in Science on Thursday.

This major finding is the result of an extremely tight flyby of Enceladus conducted by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been in orbit around the ringed gas giant since 2004. The data sourced from this close encounter adds to Enceladus’ growing reputation as one of the solar system’s leading candidates in the search for alien life, and hospitable worlds beyond Earth.

“We feel pretty fortunate that we got this information about habitability,” said J. Hunter Waite, the principal investigator of the mass spectrometer (INMS) onboard Cassini and the lead author of the paper, in a phone interview with Motherboard. “It will continue to build an interesting case for going back [to Enceladus].”

On October 28, 2015, Cassini zoomed by Enceladus at an altitude of 30 miles above the surface of this tiny moon, which is only 314 miles in diameter, small enough to fit within the length of the United Kingdom. The orbiter passed through one of the billowing plumes of vapor that frequently erupt from this world’s icy surface, and sampled its chemical contents….”

For the rest, click here.

“The way it worked behind the facade was masterful.”

What a story….

From The Daily Beast,
Louis de Wohl: The Astrologer Who Helped Foil Hitler

In the run-up to WWII, British intelligence unleashed an astrologer on an unsuspecting American public to sway public opinion on the war. He was a persuasive fake.

by Annie Jacobsen

“It was the summer of 1941 and a British astrologer named Louis de Wohl was becoming wildly popular among Americans with his increasingly accurate predictions in his stargazer column, “Stars Foretell.” As de Wohl’s reader numbers escalated to meteoric heights, real world consequences ensued. In August 1941, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lifted its long-standing ban against astrologers and aired an exclusive interview with the man being heralded as “The Modern Nostradamus.” Just a few weeks later, for the first time in U.S. history, an astrologer was filmed for a U.S. newsreel, the TV news of the day. “Pathe? News released the newsreels’ seminal plunge into prophecy with a nation-wide audience of 39,000,000 sitting as judge jury and witness,” declared a press release issued by de Wohl’s manager. Except it was a facade; it was all fake news.

De Wohl’s newspaper column was part of an elaborate black propaganda campaign to organize American public opinion in favor of Britain, and to ultimately get the U.S. to enter the war. In reality, de Wohl worked for British Intelligence (MI5). His so-called manager was none other than the legendary spymaster Sir William Stephenson, a man whom Winston Churchill famously called Intrepid. The average American had no idea…”

Click here for the rest.