The scientists, whose research was crowdfunded by a whole crew of cat lovers, hope that their work could help us find out whether orange cats are at an increased risk of some health conditions, too.

Two teams of scientists at Kyushu University in Japan and Stanford University in California determined that orange cats' color all comes down to a missing segment of their genetic code.

Suppose you hold a cat, stomach up, and drop it from a second-story window. Search for: Science. ... But for more than a century, scientists have wondered about the physics of how cats do it.

Except, Kaelin and colleagues discovered, in pumpkin-colored cats. "Arghap36 is not expressed in mouse pigment cells, in human pigment cells or in cat pigment cells from non-orange cats," Kaelin said.