From Ed Yong:

Cats have been our companions for almost 10,000 years. They have been worshipped by Egyptians, killed (or not) by physicists, and captioned by geeks. And in all that time, no one has quite appreciated how impressively they drink. Using high-speed videos, Pedro Reis and Roman Stocker from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that lapping cats are masters of physics. Every flick of their tongues finely balances a pair of forces, at high speed, to draw a column of water into their thirsty jaws.

Read the rest of the post at Not Exactly Rocket Science, where Yong explains that each sip is a tug-of-war between inertia and gravity. Here’s a little of that high-speed video:

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Hot, cold, in between, it doesn’t really matter to chameleons: They’re going to snare their prey anyway, according to findings in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s because their elastic tongues are designed like ballistic weapons.

Chameleons fire their tongues at breakneck speed, says study leader Christopher Anderson. “A chameleon’s tongue travels at accelerations exceeding 400 meters (1,312 feet) per second squared, or about 41 Gs of force,” he added. To put that into perspective, a space shuttle only develops about three Gs of force when it takes off [Discovery News]. Given that muscle performance diminishes when it gets colder, and that these lizards are ectothermic (cold-blooded), one might think their tongue prowess would trial off sharply as temperatures drop.

Not so, Anderson says. He and his team filmed veiled chameleons (Chamaeleo calyptratus) eating crickets, and controlled the temperature as they watched. For other cold-blooded creatures, the researchers say, an 18-degree Fahrenheit drop in the temperature causes a 33 percent decrease in muscle speed, and an even more dramatic drop-off in the speed of tongue movements. But the chameleons had tongue snaps that only slowed by about 10 to 19 percent … with the same temperature decrease [Scientific American]. The chameleons’ tongues also extended to their full glory despite the temperature change.

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