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Cats can transfer a variety of infections, including MRSA, toxoplasmosis, ringworm, and hookworm. (credit: Kaldari)

The ancestors of modern cats followed early farmers into Europe but weren't pets, according to a recent study. Nitrogen isotope ratios in the bones of six cats from Neolithic Poland suggest that these ancient cats hunted rodents that ate human farmers' crops, but they didn't eat quite the same diet as local people and their trusty domestic dogs. In other words, the cats lived a lifestyle similar to modern coyotes.

Cats lived near people but not with them

All modern cats trace their lineage back to Near Eastern wildcats; in fact, it's still a bit tricky to tell the domestic cats from these wildcats based on their DNA. Sometime around 5,300 years ago, it seems that these wild cats noticed that rodents like mice, voles, and hazel grouse flocked to human settlements to eat crops and food stores. The rodents came for the grain, and the cats came for the easy, abundant prey.

Between 4,200 and 2,300 years ago, a population of early farmers from Central Asia moved into Europe, where they interacted with the hunter-gatherers who already lived there. Some wild cats tagged along; archaeologists found Near Eastern wildcat skeletons in Poland from around the same period. Archaeologist Magdalena Krajcarz of Nicolaus Copernicus University and her colleagues say the cats weren't really traveling with the humans—they were just following their prey. (This argument does sound a bit like a cat wrote it.)

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  Gmail with tons of extra controls. There are now sections for "Mail," "Chat," "Rooms," and "Meet." [credit: Tahin Rahman ]

It looks like big changes are coming to Gmail. Twitter user Tahin Rahman posted leaked slides (first spotted by 9to5Google) detailing a merger between Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chat, and Google Meet that looks to be coming to the Web and mobile soon. Google's "Cloud Next 2020" conference kicked off yesterday and will be ongoing for the next three weeks, and we've heard rumors in the past detailing this exact thing, so the slides appear to have been leaked early.

The goal of all this looks to be turning Gmail into a one-stop-shop productivity site, where you can do Slack-style room-based chat or single chats, make video calls, edit documents, and send emails. The desktop site is getting extra controls in the top header and sidebar, while the main panel—which normally shows the inbox or a message—looks like it can be swapped out for other content, like a Google Doc. Meet video calls can be full-screened or float around in a picture-in-picture-style window. Don't forget, this is all in addition to the right-side panel that was introduced in the 2018 redesign, which also lets you open Google Calendar, Keep, and Tasks inside Gmail. With this design, it's like having every Google productivity app—Gmail, Chat, Meet, Calendar, Keep, and Tasks—crammed into a single page that makes you wonder why it's even called "Gmail" anymore.

Gmail has had a side-by-side two-panel view for a while, showing an Outlook-style inbox on the left and a message on the right. With this redesign, it looks like there's more of a focus on the two-panel view. The "Chats" page uses this two-panel view by default, and you can show "Chat," "Files," or "Tasks" in the left panel, with a document or something else living in the right panel. Google appears to be taking the layout of Gmail and using it for all sorts of other functionality.

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  Welcome to New London, a utopian society where everybody knows their place. [credit: YouTube/NBC Peacock ]

A savage man ignites chaos in a seemingly perfect utopian society in Brave New World, the flagship original series on NBC's Peacock streaming service, which launches today. It's an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's classic dystopian novel of the same name, suitably updated for these 21st century times. This Brave New World is a sleek, sexy, and ambitious series with strong performances and impressive CGI that feels more akin to Westworld than Huxley's novel, particularly in its philosophical underpinnings. And ultimately it provides an engrossing story of the pain of love and the human condition.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

The novel Brave New World is set in the year 2540, in the World State city of London, where people are born in artificial wombs and indoctrinated through "sleep-learning" to fit into their assigned predetermined caste. Citizens regularly consume a drug called soma (part anti-depressant, part hallucinogen) to keep them docile and help them conform to strict social laws. Promiscuity is encouraged, but pregnancy (for women) is a cause for shame. Needless to say, both art and science (albeit to a lesser extent) are viewed with suspicion.

Enlarge (credit: ftwitty / Getty)

John Cameron Denton, a founding member of the neo-Nazi group the Atomwaffen Division, has pled guilty to participating in several "swatting" incidents that occurred in 2018 and 2019, the US government announced on Tuesday. Swatting is a dangerous hoax that involves calling the police in an effort to get a SWAT team dispatched to a victim's home.

Pro Publica first unmasked Denton as a leader of the Atomwaffen Division in a 2018 story linking the group to the murder of a gay Jewish college student. Pro Publica described the group as "a white supremacist group that celebrates both Hitler and Charles Manson." The group "embraces Third Reich ideology and preaches hatred of minorities, gays, and Jews." Pro Publica says that the group has conducted in-person weapons training in several locations around the US, and people associated with the group have been charged in five murders.

John Cameron Denton. (credit: Via Pro Publica)

According to the FBI, Denton was furious about Pro Publica's story and arranged the swatting of both Pro Publica's offices and the home of a Pro Publica reporter in retaliation.