A cat-themed festival for London

Finally, London is getting the themed festival everyone has been dreaming about since the dawn of the internet: a festival themed entirely around cats — cat videos, memes and other internet-related cat things.

Catnip Festival is a one-night extravaganza celebrating cats as our all-powerful internet overlords. On Friday, November 25, from 9pm ’til late, The Coronet in Elephant and Castle, will become a celebration of all things cat.

Think massive DJ sets (likely involving cat-themed music), a room filled with cat videos played on loop, a giant gallery of cat memes, and a cat-themed circus and catrobatics.

To be clear, no actual cats will be in attendance, as the experience would be a little stressful for their little cat ears.

Instead, there will be a 360 kitten attack VR experience, a cat-themed cat game, and the joy of chatting about cats with a bunch of other feline fans.

Pigeons can read too!

Don’t underestimate the pigeon — they might look a bit dim but it turns out these birds can actually read.

Recently, scientists have found they are the first non-primate species to distinguish certain words.

The National Academy of Sciences in Washington got the four smartest pigeons they could find and showed them 8,000 combinations of words and non-words.

The birds were then left with the challenge to peck the correct answers. The clever things were even able to identify when the letters were transposed (like ‘very’ vs ‘vrey’). By the end of the experiment, the feathered subjects had built vocabularies of between 26 and 60 words.

And it wasn’t all down to luck — when shown new combinations of letters, the pigeons identified words at a rate significantly above chance.

The team then measured the pigeons’ performance against both baboons and humans, and found that their ability to differentiate between anagrams is much better than the apes.

Britain has its first ‘food waste’ supermarket

Campaigners from the Real Junk Food Project (TRJFP) have just opened ‘the warehouse’ in Pudsey, near Leeds, which, like their cafes, operates on a ‘pay as you feel’ basis.

This means people can either pay with financial donations of whatever level they feel comfortable with, or they can donate their time, energy or skills instead.

They’ve got deals with supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Ocado, while also receiving food from allotments, food banks, restaurants, cafes, food photographers and events caterers.

“There’s a mountain of food. Marks & Spencer cakes and Ferrero Rocher chocolates and punnets of grapes, tomatoes and posh crisps, and jars of olives and out-of-date bottles of that well-known easily perishable food substance — water — and down one aisle, dozens of clear plastic bin liners all filled with bread,’”the Guardian’s Carol Cadwalladr writes.

Bread, operations manager Keith Annal said, is always available in abundance because supermarkets “make so much of it, and then they chuck out so much of it.”

Although people on low incomes, unemployed and homeless people are most likely to benefit from the concept, campaigners make very clear that the project is for all.

“We don’t just feed ‘homeless people’, ‘the needy’, nor do we just feed asylum seekers, refugees or whoever. We feed everyone,” the group says on its website.

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, October 1st, 2016