[ad_1]
OOne of the most practical aspects of a cat's ownership is never (or at least rarely) dragging him into the sink to rub him against his will. As recent Georgia Tech scientists say, it's because they have unique tools to keep themselves clean. With a tongue like that of a cat, the man is superfluous.
In an article recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences David Hu, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Georgia Tech specializing in biolocomotion, deepens the grooming process for cats. Using videos captured by high-speed cameras (in the amazing video above, about 500 frames per second), he showed that cats were following a four-phase grooming diet, assisted by tiny keratinous peaks on their tongue called filiform papillae. It seems that evolution has actually made dogs fall on the front of the tongue, condemning them to trust us to get rid of their garbage with our tools of inferior quality.
We know that these taste buds have existed for several years. But this analysis shows that these structures are in fact U-shaped, hollow and slightly inclined to the throat. This construction allows them to fill with saliva. If you add up all this saliva, its volume would be about a tenth of that of a drop, according to the estimate of this document. When a cat licks, this saliva is deposited on his body.
The four-step process that most cats use to groom themselves uses these structures with great advantage. The tongue first extends from the mouth outwards and then expands laterallycausing the rigidity of the taste buds until they are perpendicular to the tongue. Finally, the cat completes a licking on the fur by depositing the water stored in the hollow cavities of the taste buds before retracting the tongue, where they are filled with saliva.
The researchers, who actually printed a 3D brush based on the structure of these taste buds, were visibly impressed by the elegance of the nature design exhibited here. But it also impressed other researchers not involved in the work, like Sunghwan "Sunny" Jung, a bioengineer at Cornell University. he told National Geographic that these taste buds answer one of the most delicate questions of bioengineering: the transport of liquids:
"The transportation of liquids is a problem for animals and engineers," he said. "This article shows that scientists can use basic animal behavior physics to answer fundamental questions."
Generally, animal languages transport liquids from one place to another by taking advantage of the surface tension of the water. A A study published in the same newspaper in 2015 (also using a high-speed camera) showed that dog Languages do this by quickly drinking water, thus creating a column that they can then pick up in their mouths. This study showed that cats use a similar process to drink water, although we now know that their language added bonus of being able to transport the liquid in another way.
In comparison, a dog's single-use language is flat and can not – cat lovers might say inferior. The document admits, however, that the dog's tongues are always effective in sucking water out of a bowl, which is more than one can say for human languages.
[ad_2]
Source link
