Friday, November 12, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Cat physics
Scientists learn physics behind how cats drink water without getting wet
By Marc Kaufman
The Washington Post
Thursday, November 11, 2010; 2:43 PM
As all cat lovers know well, felis domestica is a marvel of balance, subtlety and other hidden elegances.
This Story
Scientists learn physics behind how cats drink water without getting wet
Taking the purrfect drink is all physics to a cat
Prepare to learn of another remarkable attribute: Four researchers have painstakingly filmed, analyzed and determined how it is that a cat can drink water while (unlike a dog) keeping its chin and whiskers pleasingly dry.
The answer involves an exquisite demonstration of physics - where the cat, in effect, balances the forces of gravity against the forces of inertia, and so quenches its thirst.
"What we found is that the cat uses fluid dynamics and physics in a way to absolutely optimize tongue lapping and water collection," said Jeffrey Aristoff, now at Princeton University but who was one of the four researchers who began their studies out of curiosity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Nobody had ever studied it before, so nobody knew how the water went from the bowl into the cat's mouth," he said.
As with most basic scientific research, the usefulness of this knowledge is uncertain. But it is not, the researchers say, hard to imagine some downstream applications, perhaps in robotics.
The route from water bowl to mouth is pretty magical, as described in an article released Thursday by the journal Science.
While dogs curl their tongues to collect the water and then pull up what they can, cats barely touch the liquid with the tips of their tongues. A slight backward curl of the tip encourages liquid to adhere to the smooth top of the tongue, but that's not how the water rises.
Rather, the water on the tongue, combined with the low pressure created by the slight-curled tongue moving back up, creates a momentary stream into the mouth. The cat then snaps its mouth shut and the water is captured before the countervailing force of gravity pulls it down. An average house cat, the team found, can make four of these ministreams per second.
Intrigued by what they were learning, the four researchers went to several zoos to observe and film larger cats, and even went to YouTube to find videos of bobcats and lions drinking in the wild.
They found the same basic drinking mechanism in all the cats, though the larger ones (with larger tongues) slowed down their lapping to best take advantage of the physics at play - that is, the balance between upward movement of the water set off by the cat's tongue (the inertia) and the gravity pulling the water down. A lion, Aristoff said, laps two or three times per second.
"In the beginning of the project, we weren't fully confident that fluid mechanics played a role in cats' drinking," said Sunghwan Jung, now an engineer at Virginia Tech whose research focuses on soft bodies, like fish, and the fluids surrounding them. "But as the project went on, we were surprised and amused by the beauty of the fluid mechanics involved in this system."
Aristoff explained the dynamics at work: You're in the shower and turn on the hot water. The steam starts to rise and that upward flow lowers the pressure levels at your knees. The result is that the inside of the shower curtain will billow in towards you, unless you have some weight attached to the curtain to stop it. That interplay of motion and pressure parallels the dynamic that quenches the cat's thirst.
Something as complex as a cat drinking water doesn't get unraveled and turned into a paper at the nation's top science journal overnight. It was almost four years ago that Roman Stocker, associate professor at MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, became interested in how his cat, Cutta Cutta (or "stars, stars" in the Australian aboriginal language), drank. His enthusiasm spread to Aristoff, Jung and Pedro Rios, a physicist who works on the mechanism of soft solids.
"Science allows us to look at natural processes with a different eye and to understand how things work, even if that's figuring out how my cat laps his breakfast," Stocker said. "It's a job, but also a passion, and this project for me was a high point in teamwork and creativity. We did it without any funding, without any graduate students, without much of the usual apparatus that science is done with nowadays."
While the work on cat drinking was done for professional pleasure and to answer a question, the researchers said that there could be useful implications gleaned from their "fundamental" research.
Engineers, for example, are moving into the field of "soft robots" and are working on the basic mechanisms of how non-metallic parts behave. Aristoff said there's great interest in creating robots that can walk on water, and this research could help.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/11/AR2010111104952.html?referrer=emailarticle
By Marc Kaufman
The Washington Post
Thursday, November 11, 2010; 2:43 PM
As all cat lovers know well, felis domestica is a marvel of balance, subtlety and other hidden elegances.
This Story
Scientists learn physics behind how cats drink water without getting wet
Taking the purrfect drink is all physics to a cat
Prepare to learn of another remarkable attribute: Four researchers have painstakingly filmed, analyzed and determined how it is that a cat can drink water while (unlike a dog) keeping its chin and whiskers pleasingly dry.
The answer involves an exquisite demonstration of physics - where the cat, in effect, balances the forces of gravity against the forces of inertia, and so quenches its thirst.
"What we found is that the cat uses fluid dynamics and physics in a way to absolutely optimize tongue lapping and water collection," said Jeffrey Aristoff, now at Princeton University but who was one of the four researchers who began their studies out of curiosity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Nobody had ever studied it before, so nobody knew how the water went from the bowl into the cat's mouth," he said.
As with most basic scientific research, the usefulness of this knowledge is uncertain. But it is not, the researchers say, hard to imagine some downstream applications, perhaps in robotics.
The route from water bowl to mouth is pretty magical, as described in an article released Thursday by the journal Science.
While dogs curl their tongues to collect the water and then pull up what they can, cats barely touch the liquid with the tips of their tongues. A slight backward curl of the tip encourages liquid to adhere to the smooth top of the tongue, but that's not how the water rises.
Rather, the water on the tongue, combined with the low pressure created by the slight-curled tongue moving back up, creates a momentary stream into the mouth. The cat then snaps its mouth shut and the water is captured before the countervailing force of gravity pulls it down. An average house cat, the team found, can make four of these ministreams per second.
Intrigued by what they were learning, the four researchers went to several zoos to observe and film larger cats, and even went to YouTube to find videos of bobcats and lions drinking in the wild.
They found the same basic drinking mechanism in all the cats, though the larger ones (with larger tongues) slowed down their lapping to best take advantage of the physics at play - that is, the balance between upward movement of the water set off by the cat's tongue (the inertia) and the gravity pulling the water down. A lion, Aristoff said, laps two or three times per second.
"In the beginning of the project, we weren't fully confident that fluid mechanics played a role in cats' drinking," said Sunghwan Jung, now an engineer at Virginia Tech whose research focuses on soft bodies, like fish, and the fluids surrounding them. "But as the project went on, we were surprised and amused by the beauty of the fluid mechanics involved in this system."
Aristoff explained the dynamics at work: You're in the shower and turn on the hot water. The steam starts to rise and that upward flow lowers the pressure levels at your knees. The result is that the inside of the shower curtain will billow in towards you, unless you have some weight attached to the curtain to stop it. That interplay of motion and pressure parallels the dynamic that quenches the cat's thirst.
Something as complex as a cat drinking water doesn't get unraveled and turned into a paper at the nation's top science journal overnight. It was almost four years ago that Roman Stocker, associate professor at MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, became interested in how his cat, Cutta Cutta (or "stars, stars" in the Australian aboriginal language), drank. His enthusiasm spread to Aristoff, Jung and Pedro Rios, a physicist who works on the mechanism of soft solids.
"Science allows us to look at natural processes with a different eye and to understand how things work, even if that's figuring out how my cat laps his breakfast," Stocker said. "It's a job, but also a passion, and this project for me was a high point in teamwork and creativity. We did it without any funding, without any graduate students, without much of the usual apparatus that science is done with nowadays."
While the work on cat drinking was done for professional pleasure and to answer a question, the researchers said that there could be useful implications gleaned from their "fundamental" research.
Engineers, for example, are moving into the field of "soft robots" and are working on the basic mechanisms of how non-metallic parts behave. Aristoff said there's great interest in creating robots that can walk on water, and this research could help.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/11/AR2010111104952.html?referrer=emailarticle
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