Thirsty Cats

A new study has come out, performed by researchers at M.I.T. that sheds new light on one of the fundamental questions of science, how are cats different from dogs? Sure you may think that answer is obvious, dogs don’t make deposits into a litter box, only withdrawals.

But it turns out that there are many other important differences including the way that cats and dogs drink water. Some of you may have been hip to the fact that dogs tongues curl forward like a ladle to scoop water into their mouth and onto their face and surrounding area. Cats, in contrast, use a precise backwards tongue position to carefully drink without any unseemly wetting of the face.

Researchers in Fluid Dynamics have uncovered the secret technique of cats – they rely on surface tension of the water touching the curled back tongue to elevate a column of water out of the bowl and into their mouths. They have also found that most house cats lap about 4 times a second and acquire 0.1 ml of water with each lap.

Here is a link to the article on MSN which includes some cool slow motion video of cats drinking milk. I know, you were thinking that MIT would come up with a cold fusion reactor that would solve our dependence on foreign oil, or maybe a time machine. Well, they are still working on that, but this is what we have for now.

Evidently, researchers at Arizona State University were studying cat’s drinking behavior as well, but they haven’t gotten around to publishing their results yet. We did find a photo of their research lab however.