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Your cat is leaving a chemical on your face. Its name is F4. The translation is “you’re family,” and cats only leave it on people and animals they trust. F4 was identified in 1998 by a French researcher named Patrick Pageat. Pageat found five different chemicals coming out of glands on a cat’s cheeks, chin, and forehead, and labeled them F1 through F5. F2 has to do with mating. F3 is for territory, and cats use it to mark furniture and door frames. (You can buy a synthetic version of F3 at any pet store, sold under the brand name Feliway.) F4 is the social one. The face-rub itself has its own name too. Scientists call it bunting when face hits face, and allorubbing when the whole body gets involved. F4 builds what researchers call a colony scent. In a wild cat colony, the cats rub against each other constantly until they all smell the same. The shared smell works like a family ID. Cats with the colony scent don’t fight each other. Cats without it get treated like intruders. A study of feral cats at Church Farm, run by biologist David Macdonald, found this rubbing made up 15.7% of all social interactions in the colony. Cats are picky about who gets F4. They reserve bunting for individuals they bond with. A stranger walking in won’t get bunted, even if they try to pet the cat. A new cat being introduced to the home won’t get bunted either. Furniture and walls get F3, the territory chemical, not the social one. Bunting comes out only for the social bond. When your cat plows its face into yours, you’ve been chemically classified as family. The behavior comes from kittenhood. Kittens rub their faces on their mom as a greeting and as a way to beg for food. Adult cats keep the move and redirect it at the people and animals they bond with. When a cat rubs its face on yours, it’s doing the same thing it used to do to its mother. In feral colonies, this rubbing flows in one direction, and the direction reveals status. Cats on the edges of the group rub toward cats at the center. Lower-status cats rub toward higher-status ones. Kittens rub toward the adults that raised them. The pattern is consistent enough that researchers use it to read social status in the colony. So when your cat plows its face into yours, the gesture also says “you’re the one with the food and the warm bed.”

can't believe that just happened: Trump got a NASA question and deferred to NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, saying "the best man to tell you that is the man sitting right over here. You heard that question with those beautiful ears of yours ... He's got super hearing"

Today: a free article! A subscriber asked me what my parents did to help me when I was being bullied as a child, concerned for his own kid. So I answered! Link in replies.

They put his brain in his sisters body

We're in Stockholm. You know how there are some places where you think "Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there"? Stockholm is the kind of place that makes you want to live there.

The desire to transition never goes away. The only thing that changes are the enabling and inhibiting factors in the environment

People are mad because they think she would never say this and I want to know why you would broadcast on the internet that you understand trans women less than Sam Levinson

I’ve warned for some time that Orban and Putin despite political success as complete as the right could wish for were unable to turn the youth to their side but even alienated the future ever more. “Christian nationalism” is cynical on its face and only inspires the malding.

Gnosticism is a niche ideology that has no impact on modern cultur--