Three cats have outmaneuvered their two humans to hold a blender hostage for weeks

Febraury 1, 2022

Jessica Gerson-Neeves and her wife, Nikii, are really looking forward to using their new Vitamix blender to whip up smoothies and soups. In fact, the highly anticipated Black Friday purchase has recently become the focal point of their kitchen at home in British Columbia, Canada.

There’s just one problem: They can’t actually unpack it, reports NPR.

“It arrived in the mail on December 16, and I brought it inside and set the box down on the kitchen floor for just a quick second,” Gerson-Neeves says. “And that was a month ago.”

The cardboard box has become the site of a weekslong turf war between the couple and their three cats, in a saga that has garnered thousands of invested followers on social media.

Gerson-Neeves has posted near-daily updates on the cats’ Facebook page (warning: language), documenting their hilariously formal changing of the guard, ever-shifting alliances, and misadventures.

The posts read like dispatches from the front lines of a high-stakes battle, documenting the trio’s every move and their humans’ unsuccessful attempts to disrupt them.

The youngest troublemaker is Max, a tuxedo cat with the alias “sentient soccer ball.” Then there’s George, Destroyer of Worlds (“that’s what’s on his tag,” Gerson-Neeves says), also known as “sentient potato.” Rounding out the group is Lando Calrissian, who moonlights in the posts as “questionably sentient dust bunny” because, according to Gerson-Neeves, “he has a lot of fluff and very few thoughts.”

The cats’ page has grown from 64 followers to some 25,000, as people around the world learn about the story.

Gerson-Neeves stressed in a phone interview with NPR that the cats aren’t literally holding the Vitamix hostage. They could, of course, be hoisted off the box at any point. But she says she and her wife aren’t in a rush to end the stalemate since it’s providing some much-needed levity.

“Certainly we could relocate them. They don’t weigh a ton. It would be very easy to pick whoever’s on the box up and put them on the floor and open the box,” Gerson-Neeves says. “But why would we end something that is bringing us so much laughter? The cats are having a good time, and so many other people are enjoying this as well. I think we all are very much in need of something that is silly and low stakes right now.”

It all began, Gerson-Neeves says, when Max hopped on the Vitamix box as soon as she put it down on that fateful December day. Like any besotted cat owner, she thought it was adorable and snapped a picture, which she posted to a cat-lovers Facebook group.

“I posted it with a tongue-in-cheek caption about how this was breaking news, which clearly this was not, and by the next day I think about 10,000 people had interacted with the post,” she explains.

She wrote jokingly in the original post that she would provide updates if the standoff continued, and members of the group held her to that promise, even as days turned into weeks.

“At the cusp of the third—yes, THIRD—week of ApplianceGate, we return to the saga to find that the Questionably Sentient Dust Bunny has settled in for the night shift atop the Vitamix. While no video evidence was caught of the unfortunate incident, his occupation of the annexed territory was immediately preceded by possibly the single least graceful dismount in the history of felinehood (felinity? Whatever), which somehow involved the sentient soccer ball first smacking headfirst into a wall immediately prior to pulling a fly-you-fools, briefly hanging off of the side of the Vitamix box.”

Gerson-Neeves says she has been particularly moved by the comments that their growing audience leaves on Facebook, both the hilarious and the heartfelt.

Those include people experiencing seasonal depression, exhausted health care workers, and even one woman “who said that her husband had been profoundly depressed for a long time and this was the first time she’d seen him smile in months,” Gerson-Neeves recalls.

“It is silly and ridiculous and very low stakes and not an actual problem and just something that people can laugh at,” she adds. “Everything is so overwhelming and so painful right now that people are desperately in need of things they can just laugh at.”

Research contact: @NPR

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast