Monday, November 22, 2010

Of cats and water

You may know that most of the cats do not like very much water, except when they drink it. So they developed an original way of drinking water, much different for the one of dogs for example, in order to minimize the splash that might land on their fur. This involves the use of superficial tension force on the liquid surfaces. As the researcher (Roman Stocker from MIT) that produced this study put it: "I would say cats know more about fluid mechanics than dogs" :) The full story can be found here.
On the other hand, cats sometimes enjoy water (or snow in fact), as can be seen in the following movie: