Wednesday, November 8, 2017

November 09, 2017 at 12:38AM

Today I learned: 1) Cats and dogs don't drink the same way. Dogs use the undersides of their tongues as upside-down spoons, lapping into the water and cupping the tip of the tongue downward to catch water. Cats, in contrast, do *not* cup their tongues to catch water. Instead, they use the tip of their tongues to "grab" the top of the water, the flick their tongues up to pull a column of water toward the mouth. Inertia brings the column up until gravity breaks it. Also, cats have some water-trapping physiology in the mouth so that they don't have to swallow with every flick of the tongue. I quote: "Inside the mouth, cavities between the palate’s rugae and the tongue act as a nonreturn device and trap liquid until it is ingested every 3 to 17 cycles (15)." Details on cat tongue biomechanis here: http://ift.tt/2mGEHU5 2) Fans don't really "push" air the same way I imagined. That is, wind coming off a moving fan blade isn't just pushed straight off the blade -- it's actually a continuous ribbon-like vortex of air, curled kind of like a twinkie, with net forward momentum.... Look, it's kind of hard to describe, but you can see it here, along with some cat-lapping and other things-in-slow-motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gspK_Bi0aoQ 3) Human eyes can detect, at minimum, somewhere between 1 and 10 photons. See the section "Photon Counting in Vision" from http://ift.tt/2ylo6LN.

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