Category: Play
Fun, Paws, and Motion : The Movie
How Dogs Drink Water: Impressive Ingestion
The next time you’re cleaning up puddles by your dog’s water bowl, try to appreciate the science behind the mess. At the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, researchers described the different mechanisms animals like humans, cats, and dogs use to drink. Humans, with our full cheeks, can create suction to draw in liquid.
Other animals, including dogs and cats, don’t have complete cheeks, so they’ve found other ways to lap from the bowl. A cat’s delicate flick of the tongue may seem more precise, but how dogs drink water earns them top spot for efficiency. According to the researchers, dogs use more of their tongue to slap the water, drawing up a column at the speed of about five to eight times that of gravity when switching direction from down to up.
If only straws were as effective.
The Media’s Dog Bias
The latest discovery in media research: people love dogs (isn’t that why you’re here?), and apparently, the media does, too. A recent paper published by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Miami showed stories published in the New York Times are more likely to be picked up by other publications if they involve a dog. The Internet may have been invented for cat videos, but pups still have a solid hold on print.