Cats. How do they work?
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Princeton University decided to stop wasting their time with minute things like researching solar energy or finding new cancer therapies and instead looked into the biomechanics of… cats. More specifically, how cats drink water. Why? Because everyone loves f*cking cats, that’s why!
MIT’s Dr Roman Stocker explains how cats lap:
“The fluid comes in contact with the tongue and sticks to it, then the action of the tongue being drawn upwards very rapidly creates a liquid column.
“Then, by closing its jaw, the cat captures part of that liquid.”
Surprisingly, the researchers also found that the tiny hairs on the tongue, which were once thought to help cats lap, were not involved at all in the process.
To look at the mechanism in even more detail, the team created a robotic cat tongue. They found the process was down to an interplay between two forces: inertia and gravity.
Dr Stocker explained: “The creation of the water column is driven by the force inertia – the tendency of the liquid, once in motion, to keep going.
Their absolutely fascinating (lol) finds were published in the journal Science.
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