Tag: Cats
Jun 29 2020
History of the World According to Cats
Dec 30 2016
Now For Something Funny
It’s almost the end of a really horrible year. Between the election season and the deaths of so many celebrity favorites starting with David Bowie and ending (we hope) with Carrie Fisher and her beloved mother, Debbie Reynolds, we need a little laughter. Animals and their antics make us all chuckle.
Apr 14 2016
Who Needs Panama When We Have Delaware
The recent release of the Panama Papers, the 11.5 million confidential documents exposing the hidden wealth of world leaders, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, has caused little ripple here in the US. Why? Well, who needs Panama when America’s wealthy have Delaware. States like Delaware and Nevada have …
Nov 13 2010
Cat Got Your Tongue?
No? OK, but apparently four engineers from prestigious universities using integral calculus, high speed photography and borrowed equipment from the International Space Station, curious about how cats drink figured out just how our feline companions and their larger counterparts in the wild lap it up. It isn’t what you would think, after all, cats are not dogs.
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.
Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the point at which gravitational force would overcome inertia and cause the water to fall.
What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.
Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down – snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.
The cat laps four times a second – too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur – and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second. . . .
At first, Dr. Stocker and his colleagues assumed that the raspy hairs on a cat’s tongue, so useful for grooming, must also be involved in drawing water into its mouth. But the tip of the tongue, which is smooth, turned out to be all that was needed.
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