In science, there are many experiments that are done for pure curiosity. Scientists see the world, a question sparks, and they try to answer it. Of course, these scientists operate under the belief that increasing the pool of human knowledge should always be done—knowledge for knowledge’s sake is well worth the effort—because maybe, at some point in the future, this knowledge could become useful. This story is one such case: it’s about the way cats drink. Here’s the lead: “It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.” It’s a great lead because it’s unexpected and fascinating—the first half of the story is devoted to illustrating the marvel of feline sipping (and it really is quite cool); then the second half gets more into the details, the engineering, the science.
It’s a fun story and there’s little mention of any usefulness in this research, but there doesn’t need to be any. Why not find out more about cats? Even big cats use this highly efficient, highly evolved drinking mechanism: “The cat laps four times a second—too fast for the human eye to see but a blur—and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second…Lions, leopards, jaguars and ocelots turned out to lap (drink) at the speeds predicted by the formula.” Indeed, many readers may be asking themselves: do we seriously spend money on this kind of research? And smartly, the writer Nicholas Wade provides an answer: “Remarkably for a scientific experiment, the project required no financing. The robot that mimicked the cat’s tongue was…just borrowed from a neighboring lab.”
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