I am prodded out of my blogging torpor by this article in the NY Times.  Readers know that I'm fond of cats.  And, it doesn't get much better than when I can merge cats with science.  Especially when it highlights their superiority over dogs...

These guys from M.I.T., V.P.I., and Princeton, used high speed video to study the hydrodynamics of drinking in cats.  The study was incited by one of them observing his family cat, Cutta Cutta, drinking.  Being a curious sort, the study was on.  Once they figured out the basics, being engineers and scientists they had to generalize and predict, so they developed models and took more measurements on bigger cats (lions, jaguars) to test their predictions.  Cutta Cutta lapped 4 times per second, with a tongue speed of 1 meter/second.  Their predictions were that these would slow down in larger cats -- which is what they observed.  In addition, they modified a robot to successfully mimick the hydrodynamics of this process.

Cool...and they even got a Science paper out of it, the summary of which reads in part:  "...laps by a subtle mechanism based on water adhesion to the dorsal side of the tongue. A combined experimental and theoretical analysis reveals that Felis catus exploits fluid inertia to defeat gravity and pull liquid into the mouth. This competition between inertia and gravity sets the lapping frequency and yields a prediction for the dependence of frequency on animal mass..."