Gravity

We've all witnessed the mystical event of a house cat drinking water.  How he drops his tongue into the bowl, and carefully balances the droplets in a crevice so that it can be effectively be lapped up.  Some of us, namely myself, have even gone so far as to attempt this artful way of drinking, with varying degrees of success.

Well, here comes SCIENCE!  Ready to blow everything you knew about anything out of the water yet again!  A team of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech and Princeton University have put extensive study into the drinking mechanism of a cat.  And they have discovered that instead of scooping up water, the tongue of a cat creates a kind of gravitational inertia.

MIT's Roman Stocker and colleagues wrote, "Casual observation hardly captures the elegance and complexity of this act, as the tongue's motion is too fast to be resolved by the naked eye".  The water is drawn up through inertia in a column, which is used to get it neatly into the cat's mouth before gravity pulls it back down.  So far, this gravity defying act is only known in cats.