Cat lovers know that when kitties groom, their tongues are pretty scratchy. Using high-tech scans and some other tricks, scientists are learning how those sandpapery tongues help cats get clean and stay cool.
The secret: Tiny hooks that spring up on the tongue — with scoops built in to carry saliva deep into all that fur.
A team of mechanical engineers reported the findings on Monday, saying that they were more than a curiosity — they could lead to inventions for pets and people.
Photo: AFP / Georgia Institute of Technology
“Their tongue could help us apply fluids, or clean carpets, or apply medicine” to hairy skin, said Georgia Institute of Technology lead researcher Alexis Noel, who is seeking a patent for a 3D-printed, tongue-inspired brush.
Cats are fastidious, spending up to one-quarter of their waking hours grooming.
Noel’s interest was piqued when her cat, Murphy, got his tongue stuck in a fuzzy blanket.
Scientists had long thought cat tongues were studded with tiny cone-shaped bumps.
Noel, working in a lab known for animal-inspired engineering, wondered why.
First, computed tomography scans of cats’ tongues showed that they are not covered in solid cones, but in claw-shaped hooks.
They lie flat and rear-facing, out of the way until, with a twitch of the tongue muscle, the little spines spring straight up, Noel said.
The big surprise: Those spines contain hollow scoops, Noel found.
Turning to zoos and taxidermists for preserved tongues to examine, she found bobcats, cougars, snow leopards and even lions and tigers share that trait.
When Noel touched the tips of preserved spines — called papillae — with drops of food dye, they wicked up the liquid.
A house cat’s nearly 300 papillae hold a small amount of saliva that is released when the tongue presses on fur, and then they wick up some more.
The tongue’s surface is wetter, but Noel saw clues that the spines were key to deep cleaning.
Papillae were only slightly longer in lions than in house cats, although larger felines’ bigger tongues hold many hundreds more, Noel and institute colleague David Hu reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Next, Noel measured cat fur, which holds lots of air to insulate like a down jacket.
Sure enough, compress that fur and in numerous types of cat, the distance to the skin matches the length of the tongue’s spines, she found.
An exception: Persian cats, which have super-long fur that veterinarians caution must be brushed daily to avoid matting.
A machine that mimicked the strokes of a cat’s grooming found saliva from the tongue’s surface alone cannot penetrate as deep. A thermal camera showed that as they groomed, evaporating saliva cooled the cats.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS