(via)

While dogs slurp to alleviate thirst, cats display a mastery of physical dynamics that leaves their whiskers, chin and the counter top free of liquid, researchers found.

Researchers spent hours watching a feline consume liquids in order to understand the forces. They also made a robotic version of a cat’s tongue and watched YouTube videos of big cats drinking.

Here’s how a house cat, which averages about four laps per second, personifies daintiness while drinking.

Cats extend their tongues straight down with the tip curled backward like a capital “J” to form a ladle, so that the top surface of the tongue touches the liquid first.

“The speed of the tongue is quite incredible,” co-author Pedro M. Reis, an assistant engineering professor at MIT, told CNN.

“The smooth tip of the tongue barely brushes the surface of the liquid before the cat rapidly draws its tongue back up,” said the researchers, who received no funding for the study.

“As it does so, a column of milk forms between the moving tongue and the liquid’s surface. The cat then closes its mouth, pinching off the top of the column for a nice drink, while keeping its chin dry.”

That column, they say, is a balance between gravity, which pulls the milk back toward the bowl, and inertia, which refers to the tendency of a liquid to continue moving in a direction unless another force interferes.

Kitty knows how quickly to lap in order to balance these forces, according to the study, which drew on mathematics, fluid mechanics, physics and engineering.

“This suggests that cats are smarter than many people think, at least when it comes to hydrodynamics,” writes co-author Jeffrey M. Aristoff of Princeton.

I knew cats were smart, but I had no idea they were so knowledgeable about hydrodynamics.

Love the sound effects.

There’s a debate about whether it should be legal or not to sell unpasteurized milk. Currently it’s illegal in half of the US states. Many people I know think it’s outrageous for the government to enforce that law. If people want to drink it, why should the government stop them?

Here’s the problem: dairys are dirty. I mean really dirty. The larger the dairy, the dirtier it is. Cows go to the bathroom at the most inconvenient times. They kick over the pail. They step in the pail. The pail or machine or milk jar may not have been sterilized properly. The teats may not have been washed thoroughly. The cow may have ate something diseased or become sick and passes tainted milk.

If the government allowed the sale of unpasteurized milk, more people would get sick. That’s the entire reason we started pasteurizing it. According to Nathanael Johnson, “Between 1919, when only a third of the milk in Massachusetts was pasteurized, and 1939, when almost all of it was, the number of outbreaks of milk-borne disease fell by nearly 90 percent.” The FDA claims that raw milk can be dangerous to health and is not healthier as claimed by raw milk advocates.

Yes, there might be healthy bacteria that are killed with pasteurization. (I’m sure we kill healthy bacteria when we cook meat, too.) Yes, there are some small farmers who are meticulously clean and could keep most of the harmful pathogens out of the milk. But what happens when one of their employees fail? And how could it be guaranteed as safe as pasteurized milk? How many people can get sick before they shut a dairy down?

I can see both perspectives. It makes sense to make selling unpasteurized milk illegal. It also makes sense to allow people to drink what they want, even if it ends up hurting them. Which is why they let they let us drink the raw milk from our own cow, but don’t allow us to sell it.

So, should the government make it legal to sell unpasteurized milk even though there is evidence of increased health risks? Or is the current system necessary to protect public health, even though people want to do it? Or is the government plain wrong, raw milk isn’t dangerous at all, and is actually more healthy than pasteurized milk? (If making that last claim, please cite a reputable scientific study, as I am interested.)