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Science behind cat's lapping of water bared
Source: Agencies |
November 13, 2010, Saturday
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A CAT'S delicate lapping does not scoop up water but uses inertia to create kind of a backward waterfall, according to American researchers.
Their study is more than a curiosity.
It could provide insights into ways to robotically move liquids, the team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech and Princeton University said on Thursday.
When a dog drinks, it forms a cup with its tongue and sloshes water into its mouth - and, often the floor, as any dog owner can attest.
Cats curve their tongues the other way, so the top of the tongue touches the liquid's surface. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said they used high-speed videos to analyze how this movement gets water into the cat's mouth.
"Almost everyone has observed a domestic cat lap milk or water. Yet casual observation hardly captures the elegance and complexity of this act, as the tongue's motion is too fast to be resolved by the naked eye," MIT's Roman Stocker and colleagues wrote.
Water will stick to the smooth tip of a cat's tongue. As the cat pulls its tongue up, inertia allows the water to be drawn up in a column.
Understanding such movements help physicists sort out the relationship between gravity and inertia, they said, and can help design robots and other mechanisms.
Their study is more than a curiosity.
It could provide insights into ways to robotically move liquids, the team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech and Princeton University said on Thursday.
When a dog drinks, it forms a cup with its tongue and sloshes water into its mouth - and, often the floor, as any dog owner can attest.
Cats curve their tongues the other way, so the top of the tongue touches the liquid's surface. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said they used high-speed videos to analyze how this movement gets water into the cat's mouth.
"Almost everyone has observed a domestic cat lap milk or water. Yet casual observation hardly captures the elegance and complexity of this act, as the tongue's motion is too fast to be resolved by the naked eye," MIT's Roman Stocker and colleagues wrote.
Water will stick to the smooth tip of a cat's tongue. As the cat pulls its tongue up, inertia allows the water to be drawn up in a column.
Understanding such movements help physicists sort out the relationship between gravity and inertia, they said, and can help design robots and other mechanisms.
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