I have an okay feeling about the amish and their way of life. However, I am always wary that in isolated and religious cultures, it is harder to be neurodivergent or non cis-heterosexual and that abuse within such groups is also harder to escape from, because of the isolation and potential loss of all friends/family if you choose to leave. However, I haven’t heard many scandals involving the amish particularly.

I have lived near orthodox jews and always felt weird that they didn’t even (choose to) speak the same language as their neighbors, but only Yiddish. I also felt that while the men are very present in the street and community, you only see the women occasionally and always with a few babies/children.

We are here 🙂

And here I was imagining a diverse group of scientists, because science is rarely done by just one person anyway.

I think the cat ended up in a shelter (I don’t know the reason though) and then they discovered it didn’t match the other cat species known about. So it happened the other way around.

That’s kinda exactly what happened. There were 4 known species. One cat ended up in a shelter that was not exactly like any of those, so they decided to take DNA from 35 cats from the 4 (now 5) species and showed the 5th was a separate species.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2.full

The non-paywalled non-peer reviewed older version of this article.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 So from the abstract of the paper they use two different techniques. Lineage tracing studies in mouse embryos and differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells. Both these techniques are not even decades old at this moment.

I think the lonely part means I’m not used to having to suppress my internal voice going external anymore. Are there people that don’t have an internal dialogue going on at all times?

I talk to myself all the time and I am only in my thirties. I think it’s partly because I work from home and therefore spend around 8-10 hours talking to myself or the dog at home, or sit in total silence. It’s hard to break that habit when I’m at the shop or other public space. Many elderly people also live quite lonely lives, so maybe that’s why?