When a cat is petted in these areas, its body language often changes. "They might do a quick head turn, looking at your hand, or they might start moving away from you or wiggling around a lot, basically trying to get away from the petting," Mikel Delgado, a cat behaviorist and senior research scientist at Purdue University, told Live Science in an email. "If these early warning signs are ignored, they might escalate to biting, hissing or scratching."
But why do cats dislike it so much when humans touch these specific areas?
Although there has been little formal research into this question, animal behavior experts proposed a few ideas for why cats don't like to be touched in certain areas.
Off-limits petting zones
"Cats are prey animals as well as predators and so they can be very protective of areas that are particularly vulnerable to injury during attack, such as the belly area," Sarah Ellis, head of cat mental well-being and behavior at the cat welfare charity International Cat Care, told Live Science in an email.
A cat's belly houses vital organs — such as the liver, stomach and intestines — without the protective bony cage that the ribs provide for the heart and lungs. Although cats have evolved a special feature called the "primordial pouch" — basically a flap of loose skin and fat on their belly — which provides a little extra padding to protect vital organs during fights, most cats still feel threatened when humans touch or rub their belly.
Cats have extra padding on their stomachs to protect their organs. (Image credit: Cyndi Monaghan via Getty Images)Dogs have a similar anatomy to cats, but they have to worry less about falling prey to larger animals. Cats, meanwhile, can be hunted by dogs, urban coyotes, and even birds such as hawks and owls, making it natural for them to be protective of their bellies.
The tail is also a vulnerable area for cats. "When a cat is chased by another animal, including other cats, the tail is often the part of the cat's body that is closest to touch," Ellis said, "and the risk of being bitten at the base of the tail is high." Therefore, cats may be skittish about having their tail stroked.
When it comes to foot rubs, there are two possible explanations for why most cats hate them. First, a cat's paws are essential in threatening situations. Running away from danger is a cat's preferred survival strategy, and they rely on their paws as a means of escape, Ellis explained. If they can't run away, "a cat may resort to repelling any threats through swiping and scratching and it needs its paws free to do so," she said. "It is therefore predisposed to not enjoy having its paws restricted in any way."
Another reason could be that cats' paws are very sensitive. They have wrist whiskers (also known as "carpal vibrissae") and toe pads that are sensitive to various types of stimuli, like pressure and heat, Delgado said, "so it's not surprising that many cats are sensitive about having their feet touched."
Petting rules and exceptions
If you're interacting with a cat, it's generally a good idea to stick to the areas where most cats like to be petted: the base of their ears, around their cheeks and under their chin. These areas are rich in scent glands, and cats tend to rub them against other cats they are friends with, Delgado explained. So essentially, cats like being petted in those areas because "they treat us as they do other cats," Delgado said.
But some cats go against the grain. "I've had a few who enjoyed belly rubs," Delgado said. Others enjoy having their tail stroked briefly and show their pleasure "by pushing their rump into the hand of the petter and holding their tail up in the air," Ellis said. (This behavior is sometimes called "elevator butt.")
As puzzling as it may be to humans, these varied preferences are a reminder that "each cat is an individual," Delgado said. Positive responses to petting of the belly, feet or tail can also signal close bonding to a human, Ellis said.
She advises people to "always take the cat's lead, learn what each individual cat likes and dislikes and respect these preferences."
How much of a cat fan are you? Find out by taking our cat quiz!
'> Why do most cats hate it when you touch their belly, feet or tail? .
Interestingly enough, the comments reflect a slightly different trend. One reader wrote, "Any pioneers who travel to Mars will be facing the prospect of death and never coming back. Even if they make it back, there are any number of health issues that could come up. These risks have not stopped people from exploring throughout human history. The bigger question is who to send?"
Other commenters echoed this sentiment, with another reader posting, "Explorers in the past have always been exposed to unusual risks; without the risk takers we would still believe the world is flat."
Beyond the feelings that Mars will be explored anyway, despite the health risks, other commenters highlighted the cost of these missions, with one reader stating, "Sending flesh water balloons to Mars is ridiculous. For the cost of one human on Mars, we could literally probe the entire solar system and map/sample/rove every planet and every major Moon."
Others highlighted the mental and emotional cost of a trip to Mars. "As a devoted sci-fi fan for decades, I always wished I could go into space," another reader noted. "Now that I am 77 years old, I realize I would miss the outdoors. The wind and trees, the birdsong and sweet grass under my feet would be a devastating loss. Let the brave explorers go instead. Life is too brief to leave this planet for the uncertainty and dangers of space travel."
'> 'Life is too brief to leave this planet': Live Science readers share whether they'd go to Mars, despite health risks
The cockroach is one of several pieces of evidence suggesting that this tiny owl was diurnal, or active primarily during the day. Iridescence is associated with a diurnal lifestyle, so it appears that the owl, which measured less than 5 inches (12 centimeters) long, was hunting in the daytime, researchers said in the new study.
This indicates that owls were not nocturnal 47 million years ago and so must have switched to the night-owl lifestyle more recently, said study first author Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist and head of ornithology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and the Natural History Museum Frankfurt in Germany.
"There exists a consensus that owls must have evolved from a diurnal ancestor," Mayr told Live Science in an email. That's because some early owl fossils have head-rotation structures similar to those of diurnal raptors and bony ridges above the eye sockets that could have shaded the owls' eyes from the sun.
Therefore, it is plausible that the Messel owl was fully diurnal, rather than active during the daytime and nighttime as some owls are today, because that would imply that some of its ancestors had already evolved nocturnal traits, Mayr said.
Researchers also found a cockroach identical to the one in the Messel owl's stomach in sediments just a few feet away from the new fossil. This well-preserved cockroach helped the team to identify the insect inside the owl, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Nov. 2 in the journal Current Biology.
It's possible that the owl ate the cockroach at dawn or at dusk, which might cast doubt on whether the bird was diurnal. But there are other clues hinting that the owl was diurnal, including the appearance of some of the owl's feathers and the stoutness of its upper wing bones.
Mayr said he and his colleagues believe the shape of the upper wing bones, or humeri, is an indicator of when owls are active. The Messel owl's stocky humeri hint that the species flew during the day, when silent movement doesn't confer a significant advantage because there is enough light to see predators. Conversely, modern nocturnal owls have slim humeri and fly almost soundlessly, he said.
The fossil was so well preserved that researchers identified a cockroach in the stomach that was likely the owl's last meal. (Image credit: Mayr et al. 2026. (CC BY 4.0))Assuming this hypothesis is correct, the earliest known nocturnal owl species are from about 35 million years ago, in the Late Eocene, Mayr said. Owl fossils from this period and more recently look a lot like modern owls and have elongated humeri, he noted. The oldest known owl in the fossil record, Ogygoptynx wetmorei, dates to around 60 million years ago.
This means that owls likely became nocturnal between 47 million and 35 million years ago. This is the best current estimate, because the owl fossil record is very sparse and species are often described from only a few isolated bones, according to the study.
"We still know so little about the early evolution of modern birds," Mayr said, adding that every fossil discovery has the power to change even well-established ideas in the field.
The big question that remains is why owls became nocturnal. Previous theories suggested that owls evolved this behavior to avoid competition with diurnal birds of prey or to benefit from a proliferation of nocturnal mammals. But studies show that both of these groups exploded much later than 35 million years ago — around 20 million to 25 million years ago — suggesting there wasn't a clear advantage driving owls to switch to nocturnal lifestyles at that time.
The new results have deepened the uncertainty of why owls turned nocturnal. But "by narrowing down the time frame when owls became nocturnal, our study may eventually contribute to solving this mystery," Mayr said.
'> Perfectly preserved owl fossil from 47 million years ago could help to solve a major evolutionary mystery In the study, published Tuesday (Nov. 3) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, roughly 60% of patients whose predominant symptoms were changes to their ability to taste or smell had significantly improved three years after their first positive test. But less than 20% of those with a multisystem presentation had improved in that time frame.
This latter group had symptoms that affected their cardiac, nervous and gastrointestinal systems, among others. An expert told Live Science that the condition resembled myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which often arises after an infection and similarly impacts a wide range of bodily systems.
The new study's findings could help direct the structure of future clinical trials of treatments for long COVID, experts said.
One disease, many symptoms
The patients in the study were enrolled in the long-term RECOVER Adult Study. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the project has recruited thousands of adults across the United States who previously tested positive for COVID-19.
Researchers scored patients based on how they were affected by a range of symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath and heart palpitations. The study included patients who scored more than 10 points on a 30-point scale — called the 2024 LC Research Index (LCRI) — which attempted to capture these different symptom combinations.
Nearly 1,020 patients met this requirement and were tracked over time; they had in-person appointments and filled out symptom surveys every three months. Scientists marked patients as "improved" once they recorded LCRI scores of 10 or less at two consecutive visits. They found that 36% of the participants had improved two years after their inciting COVID-19 infection, and that figure rose to 50% after three years.
LCRIs hit zero for 26% of the participants after three years, meaning all of their symptoms were gone at the time of the survey.
Reeder said he was careful to avoid describing the participants as "recovered." This decision was influenced by input from the long COVID community to the RECOVER Adult Study, he said. They highlighted that their symptoms can wax and wane, whereas "recovery" implies a permanent resolution. The new study didn't capture, for example, whether individual patients who recorded meaningful improvement later relapsed.
The researchers analyzed which SARS-CoV-2 strain was associated with the most long COVID cases, controlling for patient vaccination status. (Image credit: koto_feja via Getty Images)Some patients' journeys were far less straightforward than the top-line data might suggest. Although men and women improved at similar rates, adults under 46 were more likely to improve than older participants were. Patients affected by the Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2, which emerged in 2021 and quickly became the dominant strain of the virus, were more likely to improve than those infected with earlier strains.
ME/CFS and long COVID
Some of the starkest differences in improvement rates were seen between patients with different symptoms.
In a previous study, RECOVER researchers had grouped participants into five subtypes, using an algorithm to connect patients with similar predominant symptoms:
- Loss of smell or taste
- Chronic cough
- Brain fog
- Heart palpitations
- Symptoms affecting multiple bodily systems
In the new study, patients in the last three groups were less likely to get better within three years. The final group's rate was particularly low, at just 19%.
Dr. Carmen Scheibenbogen, an immunologist at Charité University Medicine Berlin, said these patients' progress resembles that of people with ME/CFS.
"It looks as if at least a major subgroup is suffering from ME-CFS," Scheibenbogen said, noting that COVID-19 may have triggered their condition. "This is a disease which is triggered by different infections, but in the end, the disease [itself] is very similar," she said.
Like long COVID, ME/CFS can affect a wide array of bodily systems, and it remains poorly understood despite recent advances in research.
The team's new findings highlight the need for clinical trials to test possible treatments for long COVID. Both Scheibenbogen and study co-author Harrison Reeder, a biostatistician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said these subtypes would be important to consider in the design of these potential trials.
The multisystem subgroup, Reeder said, "might be a group where an effective intervention can make a bigger difference than people who stand to potentially have a higher chance of improvement regardless."
Future work would need to further scientists' understanding of people affected by long COVID at the level of their genes and proteins, both scientists said.
"There's a lot of work to do in RECOVER and in the world of long COVID research," Harrison said. "There's a lot of opportunity."
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
'> 50% of long COVID patients show improvement in 3 years — but the condition tends to linger in those with this subtype (JWST).
Now, astronomers have developed a new way to spot planets that were formerly drowned out in a sea of light. Using a combination of modeling and machine learning techniques, they picked out a previously hidden giant exoplanet in data from JWST. The results were published Nov. 4 in the journal Nature.
Even the most stable telescopes vibrate almost imperceptibly as they collect light, so the images a telescope produces contain ever-so-slight mismatches compared with what the instrument actually sees. These slight shifts can be enough to obscure even very large exoplanets.
To address this, Ferrer-Chavez and his team developed a "digital twin" of JWST that virtually recreates how light travels through the telescope's detectors, minus any movement-based imperfections. To fine-tune this digital replica, the researchers used computational models based in real-world physics alongside machine learning techniques similar to those used to train AI. But the authors stressed that this is not an AI model.
"Because we already know the physics, we don't need AI to understand what's happening," study co-author Jason Wang, also an astrophysicist at Northwestern, said in a statement.
The researchers named their approach Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets, or FLIP.
Using FLIP, the team analyzed data from three stars, including 51 Eridani, which is located around 97 light-years from Earth and was already suspected to have a giant exoplanet orbiting it. Although the planet, called 51 Eridani b, had been detected by ground-based telescopes, it was drowned out by light in previous JWST observations. With FLIP, however, 51 Eridani b popped out from the dataset.
The scientists hope this approach will help astronomers pick out even more hard-to-spot exoplanets, especially ones that look like the planets in our own backyard. In the nearly 35-year history of exoplanet hunting, the vast majority of planets we've found have been radically different from those in our own solar system, partially because larger and more reflective worlds are easier to spot with current telescopes.
"It's not that [solar-system-like planets] don't exist," Ferrer-Chavez said. "It's that we can't see them."
'> Scientists removed the glare from a James Webb telescope image — and unmasked a hidden planet