Kitties Drinking

In an article published yesterday in the scientific publication Who Cares? (actually, Sciencexpress), four research engineers from MIT, Princeton, and Virginia Polytechnic University report that they have finally (how long we’ve waited!) discovered how cats drink water (or milk or Johnny Walker, for that matter). Apparently this physics mystery had never been discerned because the lapping of cats happens at a rate too fast for the human eye to perceive. (Or perhaps because no one has much cared before now.) But with too much time of their hands, and armed with a high-speed camera and some kind of robot that mimics a cat’s tongue (a robot that was designed for use on the International Space Station; why the space station would require a robot that mimics a cat’s tongue involves much more complex physics than I can muster), these four researchers found that cats employ a lapping system that pits the force of inertia against the force of gravity: The tip of the cat’s tongue is thrust into the liquid rapidly, then pulled up at a rate of a meter a second, which causes a column of the liquid to shoot upward into the feline’s mouth, and then, just as gravity is about to take over from inertia, the jaw snaps shut, and the cat swallows. This all happens at the rate of four times a second. And no liquid soils the chin or whiskers (which is why cats don’t require bibs or napkins). Now, I suppose this is somewhat interesting, for the sake of just being interesting, and probably even more interesting if you’ve been smoking weed. But it raises a question that is left unanswered by the researchers: Why are we so much more interested in cats than they are in us?

If you are interested, here’s a video of the findings: