Giulia Bignami’s ‘Cats comprehend it’ comes out, a story of excellent animal behavior

Australian octopuses throwing seaweed at every different, spitting archer fish, bees that distinguish Monet’s impressionist brushstrokes from Picasso’s cubist ones, mantises that love cinema and carefully in three-D. There are those and many other great animal tales in “Cats know it” (ed. Giunti), the new e book by means of Giulia Bignami, class of 1990, a PhD in Chemistry at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. An easygoing and ironic pen inspires the pages of the work of the researcher and clinical manager who recounts, and retraces, the scientific consequences that have emerged on the animal international in current years in various universities around the arena.

With her new work – the primary in 2021 became ‘The astronomical raft’ – Giulia Bignami takes us, among amusing and technological know-how, on a thrilling journey full of surprises a few of the most curious ethological experiments, illustrated via the creativeness of Laurina Paperina . “It’s no longer precisely a bestiary” articulates the writer whilst talking with Adnkronos. “The idea of ​​accumulating a number of the wonders and oddities that characterize the animal international was born – she explains – from the choice to make known how tons there is nonetheless to be amazed, and to study, starting from all that we (yet) do not recognize approximately other animals”.

“Without an engaging dissemination component – he also observes – the results of lengthy, possibly complex and virtually demanding clinical research, completed with the aid of researchers scattered during universities round the sector, run the threat of remaining closed in a bubble of simply scientific relevance”.

“I set myself a totally substantial, perhaps not possible assignment”

“The challenge I actually have set myself is consequently extremely vast and possibly not possible – however in any other case what will be the a laugh? – and it's miles to move the reader on a thrilling however instructive, unexpected but clinical adventure via which to break this reputedly unattainable technology bubble to the general public, however above all to form (consciously, or possibly not) a brand new angle, a new factor of view on the arena” underlines Giulia Bignami,

The writer, who lives and works in Edinburgh as a researcher and clinical manager, explains that her new e book “isn’t exactly a bestiary, or alternatively a instead uncommon bestiary”. “The conventional subdivision of animals among water, earth and air – he maintains – is best partly reputable, as a substitute giving greater space to a very last phase absolutely committed to beauty, artwork, illusions and magic, aspects of sensitivity and perception that we're used to thinking about an distinctive folks human animals”.

Furthermore, provides Giulia Bignami, “the illustrations that accompany every chapter do no longer simplest perform the (classical) undertaking of presenting each animal to the reader however are born from the creativeness of the artist Laurina Paperina with the goal of immediately related to the reader, in direct, immediately and visual manner, inside the weird experiments and in the precise behavioral elements that I then deepen in the route of the narration”. “In this experience, the complementarity between scientific results and inventive interpretation is of essential importance to make certain clean and on the equal time interesting verbal exchange” she assures.