Sally: Grandma's Hairless Cat

By Matt P.

You may or may not have a cat as a pet, but you have most likely seen one. While you were at your grandma's house observing her hairless cat, did you take the time to look at the magic of how he or she drinks? A recent paper has gone into detail of the wonderful complexity of just exactly how cats go about drinking. After reading those first sentences, you may be wondering what I could possibly be talking about. In your mind, you've most likely thought that cats drink in a simple manner. They form a ladle with their tongue and scoop the liquid into their mouth. Wrong. The method I just described is used by dogs, but cats employ a completely different method. Cats, being the intelligent creatures they are, take advantage of the liquid's inertia. Inertia is the laziness of an object, in simple terms. Inertia is the unwillingness of an object to change unless it is manipulated by another force. In this case, we will make the liquid milk and the manipulator gravity. As your grandma's hairless cat stealthily approaches the milk filled bowl (while wearing kitten mittens), he prepares to take full advantage of the inertia of the milk. Your grandma's cat, henceforth known as Sally, dips her tongue, which is the same color as her fur (or lack thereof), into the milk. Almost as quickly as the tongue enters the milk, she pulls it, yanking the milk up into the air. For a split second, the inertia of the milk suspends it in the air, and in this moment, Sally surrounds the milk with her mouth and swallows it. After that split second of suspension, gravity, the manipulator, kicks in, snapping the milk back down into the bowl. Still thirsty, Sally repeats the complex and intricate process again until her thirst is quenched.

The intricacy of this seemingly simple process was discovered by a team of scientists led by Pedro Reis. The team went about observing this by using high speed cameras, as cats dip their tongues down into the liquid an astounding three and a half times per second. Even more astoundingly, when the tongue shoots back into the mouth, it moves at a speed of seventy-eight centimeters per second. When Reis first began the experiment, he and his team figured that the roughness of the cat's tongue would play a role; a prediction that was drastically wrong. In actuality, the tip of the tongue that penetrates the surface of the liquid is smooth, and the smoothness is actually very good for lapping up the milk or water. Throughout the research, Reis and his team found that the viscosity of the liquid, and least between the bounds of what a cat would logically drink, did not affect the process. Rather, the determining factors were the inertia and gravitational pull. One may think that this is an odd thing to research or that somebody must have done it before, but as Rebecca Z. German of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says, "What we know about mammalian feeding is woefully incomplete."

Here are some videos, one of a cat lapping up milk in slo-mo, and the other of a simulator demonstrating the inertia of water.


FAST LAPS from Science News on Vimeo.


TONGUE SUBSTITUTE from Science News on Vimeo.

So now you know, and next time you see your grandma's hairless feline lapping up some milk, you can explain to all your friends what Sally is really doing.

Source:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/65379/title/Cats_drink_using_lap-and-gulp_trick
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-481062/Puss-Hood-Hairless-Sphynx-cat-keeps-warm.html

TIB: Christopher

By Shelby M.

I never really got to know my cousins until I was eight years old. That’s when

we moved to Connecticut from Washington D.C. and moved in down the street

from them. I had spent time with them over numerous holidays. However, I soon

got to know my cousins a lot better, particularly Christopher. I remember being

flabbergasted when I would see my ten-year old cousin watching Barney, clapping

his hands, and bouncing up and down like a four-year-old kid after drinking a Red

Bull. I didn’t understand why Christopher couldn’t ask for chicken fingers and would

instead grab them off some one else’s plate. He couldn’t talk; he could only groan. I

couldn’t understand why Christopher acted so differently than me.

Christopher has Down Syndrome and is autistic. He has trouble with things

that we take for granted. He can’t read, write, or talk. When I was younger, I would

pray to someone, anyone, that Christopher would get better. I would pray that he

would one day be able to say his brother’s name, tell his parents he loves them, or

thank them for everything they’ve done for him in his life and every day to come.

What’s worse than Christopher’s disability is the way that other people

perceive his inability. The easiest way to describe this is to reference a feeling I

know almost everyone in this room has felt. It’s the feeling of getting on an airplane

or any means of transportation, and seeing a baby in the seat behind you. For the

whole flight, you groan as you hear the baby wailing behind you, disrupting your

flight. However, as the flight lands, you play peekaboo with the cute little baby,

asking how old he/she is, forgetting about the disruption the baby created. I believe this is because once

 the flight is over, we realize that the baby’s behavior wasn’t its fault.

This is similar to the feelings my family and I endure whenever we are out in

public with Christopher. We get the same glares and quizzical faces. However, they

never see Christopher as I do, or as my family does. They can’t see the look on my

Grandma’s face when he hugs her. They just hear his moans, and nothing else.

In order to really understand anything or anyone, we have to look beyond

the surface. When I was in the second grade, I met Julia. I wasn’t afraid to look at

her, while most people had the tendency to look away from her as soon as they

realized she was different. Julia was confined to a wheelchair and suffered from

brain seizures. I wasn’t afraid of her or her disability, because of Christopher. From

my experience with Christopher, I wasn’t afraid to go up to Julia during class and

talk to her, although she couldn’t respond. When most people see Julia, all they can

see is her disability. Looking beyond her disabilities, I was able to see her for her

abilities. For example, I was amazed to learn that Julia was taking piano lessons.

However, I don’t think most people can imagine a person as severely disabled as

Julia being able to play the piano. I know I didn’t. I learned to see Julia for what she

could do, not for what she couldn’t do.

During the Special Olympics last year and this year, I was greatly affected by

the athletes. The goal of the Special Olympics is to make the athletes feel like they can do anything and

can succeed with their disability. Through the sense of hope

and strength, the athletes were able to feel special. We gave them the opportunity to

be special. Everywhere else, they are looked upon as different. However, we were

able to make them feel special.

The feeling of belonging is probably one of the greatest feelings in the world.

It is the feeling that you have a place in the world, and that someone else cares

about you. When people are different than we are, it’s easy to look the other way

and treat them as if they are invisible. Even worse is to see them only for their

disability, to see them only for their faults. I believe everyone deserves to feel like

they belong. In order to do this, I believe we have to accept people for who they are.

Everyone has been touched by someone who has some kind of disability, whether it

is physical or mental. There is no reason to hide or be embarrassed by it, and we

should instead embrace it. This I believe; everyone has a place in the world, and we

are all on our way to finding it.