No cheeks, no problem
A Harvard biologist has come to the defense of dogs, refuting scientific claims that canines’ slobbery drinking results from unsophisticated ladling with their tongues, showing that they use the same subtle combination of physical forces and anatomy used by their archenemies — cats. Alfred W. Crompton, the Fisher Professor of Natural History Emeritus, his longtime assistant Catherine Musinsky, and his faithful Portuguese water dog, Matilda, joined forces after a 2010 paper written by a team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists described in great detail how cats use adhesion and inertia to literally pull columns of water from a dish into their open mouths before closing their jaws to trap the water. The MIT paper, published in the journal Science, said that cats curl the tips of their tongues backward, forming a large flat area that comes into contact with the surface of the liquid. The water adheres to the...