Another Dog Food Recall To Watch Out For, It Could Make Your Dog Sick

All About Cats Rebrands As Cats.com, Solidifying Its Place As A Thought Leader For Cat Owners

All About Cats, a leading web resource for all things feline, announces its rebranding as Cats.Com. This strategic move is a culmination of the site's commitment to becoming the web's most authoritative and trusted source of reputable, expert-led information on cats. The new domain name, Cats.Com, embodies the site's dedication to giving cat lovers the most comprehensive and reliable insights into feline care, behavior, health, products, and more.

Originally called We're All About Cats, the site was created in 2016 after founder Doron Wolffberg's cat experienced a life-threatening bout of urinary tract disease. This experience started Wolffberg on a mission to educate himself on feline nutrition and care. He created the site to empower others to take better care of their cats as well. 

A Commitment to Reputable, Expert-Led Information

The site's editorial team, composed of experienced veterinarians, behaviorists, and cat care specialists, ensures that all content is evidence-based, accurate, and up-to-date. From reviewing cat products to offering practical advice for behavioral challenges, Cats.Com strives to empower cat owners with the knowledge they need to give their cats the best.

"The transition to Cats.Com reflects our commitment to being the web's most extensive and trustworthy source of cat knowledge," said Doron Wolffberg, founder of Cats.Com. "There could not be a domain name better representative of our intentions for this community, and it's a privilege to call it home."

(credit: cats.Com)

What to Expect from Cats.Com

Along with the domain name transition, Cats.Com has redesigned the website, making it easier to explore top guides and find the answers to cat care questions. The site's comprehensive content library covers a wide range of topics, including cat health, nutrition, behavior, and product reviews. In addition to the articles on the website, Cats.Com offers educational and entertaining content on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. 

The new brand is also launching a series of expert-led courses for cat owners. 

Currently offering two behaviorist-led courses on litter box avoidance and scratching, the cat knowledge leader aims to empower cat people through guided, interactive education. 

"We've already created this knowledge base for people who want to give their cats the best," says Head of Brand Mallory Crusta, "it made sense to give them an interactive learning experience as well."

Animal rescue organizations highlight surrender prevention and owner education as critical parts of their efforts, and courses like this can help new and experienced cat owners resolve problems and enjoy more happy years with their cats. 

Through Cats.Com's course portal, users are able to sign up and receive world-class cat care education and track their progress through interactive quizzes and assignments. Additional resources are available to help cat owners implement their learnings in real life. A forum allows them to ask questions and learn from fellow students and teachers.

About cats.Com:

Since 2016, Cats.Com has been on a mission to help people give their cats better lives. A team of veterinarians, cat behaviorists, and other experts work to create best-in-class content educating cat owners on everything they need to give their cats the best. 

This article was written in cooperation with cats.Com

Long Island Town May Make It Illegal To Feed Feral Cats. Opponents Call It 'animal Cruelty'

A new proposal in a Long Island town is leaving some animal lovers feline not so great.

Babylon Village is looking to put a stop to people feeding feral cats because of the impact the animals they say have on local wildlife. The proposed ban comes after complaints from residents about people frequently coming to certain spots — like near a local park entrance — to give the stray cats food.

That prompted village officials to take action. But advocates believe there are better options than an all-out ban, and are lobbying the village to drop the proposal.

"This mayor wants to starve these cats. That's animal cruelty," said Christine Lanteri.

She travels to Babylon every day to feed about five cats, and doesn't understand why it would generate complaints.

"Cats will most certainly die," said Virginia Scuddy, who operates a cat rescue group. She and Lanteri were among those voicing opposition to the feeding ban at a village board meeting on Tuesday.

"The village of Babylon, I'm shaking my head at them, all the board members. At the end of the day, you will be known as an inhumane village," said Scuddy.

No Babylon Village officials would offer comment despite repeated efforts by NBC New York. No decision has yet been made on the feeding ban idea, as the board has yet to decide whether to move forward with it.

Scuddy maintains there is a better solution: An organized plan to trap, spay and neuter the cats, then release them. She says that course of action has been proven to reduce feral cat colonies while keeping survivors healthy.

"We have volunteers that feed colonies that we have helped to spay and neuter... What happens is you're preventing unwanted litters. Also preventing illness and death," she said. "Rather than scold them and say you can't do this, how about properly educating them so that they're doing right by the cats?"

All About Cats, And What Ethernet Classifications Mean Beyond 'Bigger Number Better'

Although it probably feels like forever to many of us since Category 5 Ethernet cabling became prevalent, now that 2.5 and even 5 Gbit Ethernet has trickled into the mainstream, a pertinent question that many probably end up asking, is when you should replace Cat-5e wiring with Cat-6, or even Cat-7. Since most of us are likely to use copper network wiring for the foreseeable future in our domiciles and offices, it is a good question that deserves a good answer. Although swapping a Cat-5e patch cable with a Cat-7 one between a network port and computer is easy enough, replacing all the network cable already pulled through the conduits of a 'future-proofed' home is not.

The good news is probably that Category 8 Class II (Cat-8.2) is all you need to run your 40 Gbit Ethernet network with standard twisted pair wiring. The bad news is that you're limited to runs of only thirty meters before signal degradation begins to kick in. If you take things down a notch to Cat-6A or Cat-7 (ISO/IEC 11801 Class EA and F, respectively), you can do 100 meter runs at 10 Gbit/s just like 100 meters runs at 1 Gbit/s were possible with Cat-5e before. Yet what differentiates these categories exactly?

Spectral Bandwidth The increased spectral use of the copper wiring by subsequent Ethernet standards.

The primary measurement that underlies these differences is called the spectral bandwidth, and is defined in Hertz. The bandwidth for twisted pair Ethernet wiring is in the MHz range, with Cat-5(e) hitting 100 MHz, Cat-6 250 MHz and Cat-6A 500 MHz. What this effectively means is the number of times that the signal can change per second before the receiver no longer is capable of receiving the entire session, at which point data loss will occur.

Much of the improvement in speeds over the same copper wiring is due to improved encoding schemes (also known as the line code), which are also responsible for boosting dial-up internet from a few baud to a few kilobytes per second. Here an essential factor is also the overhead of the encoding scheme, such as the old-school Manchester encoding used with 10BASE-T Ethernet. For its rated 10 Mbit you need at least 10 MHz spectral bandwidth to keep up, which worked fine even on Category 3 unshielded twisted pair (UTP) wiring, as is still commonly used for telephone wiring.

Eye pattern of a 100BASE-TX Ethernet data stream. MLT-3 can only transition one level at a time, unlike PAM-3. (Credit: Andrew A. Zonenberg)

Here the encoded signal uses 2-level encoding (binary 0 or 1), but it's also possible to use more levels for the encoded signal, such as the 4-bit-5-bit (4B5B) encoding of 100BASE-TX (Fast Ethernet), which encodes 4 bits of data in 5 bits, which would normally require 125 MHz of bandwidth to transfer, but the final encoding step of 100BASE-TX is MLT-3 (Multi-Level Transmit), which as the name suggests cycles between three voltage levels (+1, 0, -1 V). Due to the use of MLT-3, to reach the effective data rate of 100 Mbit/s only a bandwidth of 31.25 MHz is required rather than 125 MHz.

Interestingly, 100BASE-T1 uses a three-level PAM-3 (Pulse-Amplitude Modulation) encoding, which makes it more practical for automotive and other embedded applications, but limits this version to a mere 15 meters on the same Cat-5e. For Gigabit Ethernet (1000BASE) the 1000BASE-T1 variant is similar in that it uses PAM-3 for the encoding, but requires (500 MHz capable) Cat-6A cabling due to its 375 MHz bandwidth requirements.

The more pedestrian 1000BASE-T uses 4-dimensional Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM 4D) and PAM-5 on all 4 wiring pairs in Cat-5, demanding a mere 62.5 MHz from the 100 MHz that Cat-5 is required to handle. Although a 1000BASE-TX standard was proposed in 2001 to replace the 1999 1000BASE-T standard that would use only PAM-5 on Cat-6 wiring, this was a failure in the market as the 1999 standard more than met the market's demand.

Yet now that 2.5 Gbit Ethernet and beyond seem to have truly arrived, it ought to be clear that Cat-5 and the tweaked Cat-5e standards are now rapidly gaining legacy status, and should not be considered for new purchases and installations. Even though 2.5GBASE-T (using 64B66B, PAM-16 and DSQ128) can technically use 100 MHz Cat-5e wiring courtesy of its 100 MHz bandwidth requirement, this assumes flawless wiring. Putting in 500 MHz-capable Cat-6A would give much more leeway (up to 400 MHz-requiring 10GBASE-T), with a healthy tolerance in the case of degraded cables.

Twists And Turns Cross sections of three different types of 10 gigabit network cables. (Credit: Tosaka, Wikipedia Commons)

With the basics of spectral bandwidth out of the way, a pertinent question that may have floated to the surface of one's mind by this point is where the twists in 'Ethernet cables' (twisted pair cabling) are relevant. Perhaps more specifically: where does the extra spectral bandwidth in those different categories of  networking cables come from?

The basic answer is that it is affected by the used conductor material (e.G. Copper) and the amount of interference (EMI and crosstalk) which limit the effective range and bandwidth of the signal. For Category 6 and up this means that only copper (not e.G. Copper-clad aluminium (CCA) ) is an acceptable conductor, leaving the remainder of the research focus on reducing the impact of external interference. The first line of defense here is found in the presence of the signal pairs, each of which form a balanced signal pair that enables significant amounts of noise to be rejected.

By also twisting these two conductors within a balanced pair around each other, the amount of electromagnetic noise they're exposed to is reduced, while also reducing the amount of noise these twisted pairs expose nearby pairs to, effectively limiting the amount of crosstalk. The more twists per length of cable, the more significant this effect is. The relevant standards do not specify a specific number of twists (pitch) per length of cable, just that the cable can perform at the parameters required by the targeted standard.

In order to further increase noise rejection, the cable can be further shielded in a variety of ways, either with foil around the individual pairs (U/FTP), around all the pairs (F/UTP), or both (F/FTP). A network cable can be marked and sold as Category 6A if it passes a 500 MHz bandwidth and crosstalk test, for the latter measuring crucial parameters such as Near End crosstalk (NEXT, near the transmitter) and Far End crosstalk (FEXT, near the receiver). With Category 6+ wiring alien crosstalk (AXT) from neighboring cables becomes more crucial as well.

Squeezing Copper

Category 7, 7A and 8 cables use even stricter noise shielding than Cat-6A in order to bump the spectral bandwidth up to 600 MHz for Cat-7, 1 GHz for Cat-7A and a pretty amazing 2 GHz for Cat-8. As noted earlier, Cat-8 is what's required to run networks at 25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T speeds, albeit over fairly short distances (~30 meters). In general use you will find Cat-6(A), as well as Cat-7(A), with the latter being mostly advertised for fixed installation (using the solid core version), though you could argue that between a theoretical 500 and 600 MHz it's somewhat of a toss-up, especially when taking into account factors like the quality of installation, such as the untwisting of pairs when punching them into a terminal block.

With either Cat-6A or Cat-7(A) run through the conduits of the new office or one's dream house, it would seem likely that this is as far as copper will be pushed for now. As anyone who has recently browsed at their local IT networking store for 5 and 10 GBit cards and switches can probably attest to, at these extreme points of twisted pair networking the cost picture between a copper- and fiber-based network begin to somewhat blur together.

For equipment that supports SFP modules, it's even possible to switch its interfaces between copper-based twisted pair and fiber-optic versions, which at least saves the trouble of replacing the entire device if upgrading the network to fiber. It's quite possible that by the time that 10GBASE-T begins to feel as old and grizzled as 1000BASE-T today, fiber-optics may be the new mainstream standard. This would have the advantage of fiber-optics being immune to factors like EMI and crosstalk, while providing the potential for 100+ GBit home networks.

Until that time, it's best to ensure you get your twisted pair cables from reputable brands, as anyone can put some lettering on a cable, yet not many have the test equipment lying around to validate that a 'Cat-6A' cable isn't secretly a barely-Cat-5-cable with CCA conductors. Just so that you don't wonder later why your '2.5 GBit network' actually runs at closer to Fast Ethernet speeds.

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