The cat tour started small.

John Edwards thought it would be hilarious — and somewhat ridiculous — to lead a walk through his Minneapolis neighborhood admiring the many felines that live there.

“It’s the kind of densely populated neighborhood where if you’re walking around, you’re going to see a lot of cats,” said Edwards, who lives in Lowry Hill East — often called “the Wedge” because of its wedgelike shape — where there are roughly 9,300 residents.

About a dozen people showed up for the impromptu cat tour, led by Edwards, seven years ago. Over a two-mile walk, the group stopped to see some 20 cats peeking through their windows.

Edwards — who runs a hyperlocal media publication called Wedge Live — never anticipated his cat tour concept would catch on. But people loved it and wanted more, so Edwards began organizing an annual cat tour.

It grew every year.

For well over a century, we had the opportunity to study Neanderthals—their bones, the items they left behind, their distribution across Eurasia. So, when we finally obtained the sequence of their genome and discovered that we share a genetic legacy with them, it was easy to place the discoveries into context. In contrast, we had no idea Denisovans existed when sequencing DNA from a small finger bone revealed that yet another relative of modern humans had roamed Asia in the recent past.

Since then, we've learned little more. The frequency of their DNA in modern human populations suggest that they were likely concentrated in East Asia. But we've only discovered fragments of bone and a few teeth since then, so we can't even make very informed guesses as to what they might have looked like. On Wednesday, an international group of researchers described finds from a cave on the Tibetan Plateau that had been occupied by Denisovans, which tell us a bit more about these relatives: what they ate. And that appears to be anything they could get their hands on.

A new law barring the production or sale of high-inducing, hemp-derived cannabis products will take effect Monday after a judge declined to block it.

Hemp Quarters 605, a Pierre-based shop that sells those products, filed a lawsuit earlier this month in U.S. District Court in South Dakota. The business claims the new law’s provisions are unconstitutional and in conflict with federal law.

Several laws passed in the 2024 legislative session took effect Monday, establishing new policies and funding sources for education, economic development and the environment.

The law, which took effect last year, says people with felony convictions regain the right to vote after they have completed any prison term.

Quinn ruled the law was unconstitutional in a pair of orders in which he sentenced two offenders to probation, but warned them they were not eligible to vote or to register to vote — even though the law says they were. It was an unusual step because nobody involved in those cases ever asked him to rule on the constitutionality of the law.

A team of researchers led by an archaeologist at the University of Sydney are the first to suggest that eyed needles were a new technological innovation used to adorn clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity.

"Eyed needle tools are an important development in prehistory because they document a transition in the function of clothing from utilitarian to social purposes," says Dr. Ian Gilligan, Honorary Associate in the discipline of Archaeology at the University of Sydney.

From stone tools that prepared animal skins for humans to use as thermal insulation, to the advent of bone awls and eyed needles to create fitted and adorned garments, why did we start to dress to express ourselves and to impress others?

A host of Minnesota environmental groups are calling out state agencies tasked with protecting public health and natural resources, alleging that regulators consistently cater to industrial interests.

People Not Polluters, a 16-member coalition, issued a June 11 declaration taking on Minnesota agencies. Citing examples from the Line 3 oil pipeline in northern Minnesota, to agriculture feedlots in the southeast and industrial sites like Smith Foundry in Minneapolis, People Not Polluters makes the case that Governor Tim Walz’s administration favors industry over the public.

“We see a pattern of polluting industries having undue influence over state agencies that are charged with protecting human health and the environment,” said Margaret Levin, state director of the Sierra Club’s North Star Chapter.

Archaeologists made an intriguing find this week at Michigan's Colonial Michilimackinac, Mackinac State Historic Parks officials said, an 18th century brass trade ring.

Researchers with the archaeological program at the Mackinaw City museum identified the piece as a trade good sometimes known as a "Jesuit Ring," parks officials announced in a press release.

"It's incredibly exciting," Dominick Miller, chief of marketing for Mackinac State Historic Parks, told The Detroit News.

A team of geneticists and archaeologists affiliated with multiple institutions in France has uncovered skeletons in an ancient gravesite not far from Paris that show evidence of steppe migrant integration with Late Neolithic Europeans. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

Prior research has shown that there was a slow migration of herding people from what is now Russia and Ukraine to Europe thousands of years ago. During the migrations, many of the migrants (who were mostly male) produced children with the local farmers they encountered.

In this new study, the research team reports evidence of such reproduction in remains found in an open grave in the Champagne region of France. Skeletons in the grave showed evidence of a native European woman who had produced a child with a steppe migrant.

The labor union representing more than 200 Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board employees voted to authorize a strike this week.

LIUNA Local 363 employees cast ballots with 94% in favor, the union said in a Facebook post.

Employees have for years called for improvements to wages, health care and safety precautions, AJ Lange, Business Manager of LIUNA Local 363 said in a statement.

"Despite our endless hard work, skill, and dedication that makes Minneapolis' parks the best in the nation, management continues to treat us with contempt," Lange said.

Throughout the mountains of the American West, carvings hidden on the trunks of aspen trees tell the stories of the sheepherders who made them as they passed through with their flocks. Most of the men who etched these arborglyphs into the living trees were Basques who, starting with the Gold Rush of the 1840s, had immigrated from the Basque Country that straddles the Pyrenees Mountains.

A controversial bill that would have allowed developers to build on archaeological sites in some environmentally sensitive coastal areas was overhauled on June 19.

Language that would have allowed builders to disturb archaeological resources in the course of development in the coastal Areas of Environmental Concern was removed from House Bill 385 entirely. After being introduced earlier this month, that original proposal met widespread opposition from Native Americans in North Carolina and the state's Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The ancestors of Alaska Native people began using local copper sources to craft intricate tools roughly 1,000 years ago. Over one-third of all copper objects archaeologists have found in this region were excavated at a single spot, named the Gulkana Site.

This is the site I’ve studied for the past four years as a Ph.D. student at Purdue University. In spite of its importance, the Gulkana Site is not well known.

To my knowledge, it isn’t mentioned in any museums. Locals, including Alaska Native Ahtna people, who descend from the site’s original inhabitants, might recognize the name, but they don’t know much about what happened there. Even among archaeologists, little information is available about it – just a few reports and passing mentions in a handful of publications.

However, the Gulkana Site was first identified and excavated nearly 50 years ago. What gives?

Archaeology has a data management problem, and it is not unique to the Gulkana Site. U.S. federal regulations and disciplinary standards require archaeologists to preserve records of their excavations, but many of these records have never been analyzed. Archaeologists refer to this problem as the “legacy data backlog.”

As an example of this backlog, the Gulkana Site tells a story not only about Ahtna history and copperworking innovation, but also about the ongoing value of archaeological data to researchers and the public alike.

Many rural pride events in Minnesota have at some point faced pushback, or even threats. Over the weekend Cook County Pride in Grand Marais received a bomb threat.

Meanwhile, Itasca Pride in Grand Rapids is also facing pushback as they get ready for their first ever celebration this weekend. But despite that, rural pride events are still successful in Minnesota.

East Central Pride in Pine City, claims to be the first rural pride in the country, and celebrated with its 19th annual event at the beginning of June.

For the first two years of East Central Pride, chair Aaron Bombard said they more or less flew under the radar. Then in the third year, the community realized it was here to stay and there was some opposition.

“They had a pro-family picnic where they had Christian music groups kind of trying to oppose us,” Bombard said. “I kind of laugh at the idea — as if LGBT pride is not pro-family.”

Jaleel Stallings was swept up in the chaos of protests over George Floyd’s murder. The outcome changed his life.

Celebrate Juneteenth in the Twin Cities this year with more than a dozen events that include free food, a carnival, educational opportunities and face painting, among other family-friendly activities.

Juneteenth, which falls on June 19, marks the anniversary of an 1865 order in Texas that freed slaves in the state at the end of the Civil War. The order came two years after President Abraham Lincoln ended slavery nationwide in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation. News of the emancipation was slow to reach Texas.

Juneteenth became a federally recognized holiday in 2021, and is considered the longest-running African American holiday, when community members acknowledge and celebrate Black liberation and accomplishments.

Here are a list of Juneteenth events around the Twin Cities:

Archaeologists have analyzed the chemical makeup of glass beads from across the Great Lakes region of North America, revealing the extent of Indigenous influence on transatlantic exchange networks during the 17th century AD.

Glass beads were a key component of trade between Europeans and Indigenous Americans during early interactions between the two continents. One of the key actors in these networks was the Wendat Confederacy, which was based in southern Ontario until around 1650, when some Wendat people moved into the Western Great Lakes region.

Beads are a key symbol of European colonization, as they were produced in Europe but had a lasting impact on Indigenous Americans, with beadwork continuing to be integral to many Indigenous cultures to this day.

As such, it was thought that trans-Atlantic bead exchange networks must have been driven by European colonization. The first Europeans colonized the Western Great Lakes region around 1670.

On Tuesday evening Royce White, the Minnesota GOP-endorsed candidate to challenge U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, posted a map to Twitter, now X, with the following caption: “Crime in Minneapolis…Out of control. Come on now. Refund the police! #Godspeed”

The sentiment was standard fare for a political party that often seeks to make crime a centerpiece of its election campaigns.

The map, on the other hand, didn’t show crime at all, but rather the locations of 195 public drinking fountains in the city.

It’s the latest in a long line of embarrassments for a candidate who has himself pled guilty to theft and disorderly conduct, endorsed conspiracy theories, denigrated women and LGBTQ people, described himself as an “antisemite,” fallen behind on child support, and played fast-and-loose with campaign finance laws.

The verdicts come in the seventh week of trial, and after rare allegations of jury tampering led to the dismissal of two jurors.