Joey ?Cats' quick sips are a marvel of physics
Friday, November 12, 2010 02:50 AM
By Nicholas Wade
The New York Times
This cat is judging the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces, researchers say.
Cats' quick sips are a marvel of physics
It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now.
The act of drinking is no big deal for humans, who can fully close their mouths to create suction. But the various species that cannot do this - including most adult carnivores - must resort to some other mechanism.
A dog thrusts its tongue into water, forming a crude cup with it, and hauls the liquid back into the muzzle.
Cats, both big and little, are much classier, according to new research led by Pedro M. Reis and Roman Stocker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Writing in yesterday's issue of Science, the team reported that the feline lapping method depends on the cat's instinctive ability to calculate the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces.
What happens is that the cat darts out its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
The tongue is then pulled upward quickly, drawing a column of water behind it. Just at the moment that gravity overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down - snap! The cat closes its jaws over the jet of water and swallows it.
The cat laps four times a second, and its tongue moves at a speed of 1 meter per second.
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2010/11/12/cats-quic...
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