Saturday, August 18, 2012

LOOK: How Wet Dogs Dry By Shaking Explained!


This is fascinating stuff! Some scientists and engineers have studied how dogs shake their fur incredibly efficiently to dry themselves and wet and discovered that a  "dog can shake roughly 70 percent of the water from its fur in four seconds."

In fact, it's not only dogs.
So, get this, the process that dogs use is common to many mammals, even if some, like kangaroos and elephants, don't really need to use it for a variety of reasons. And the researchers found something astounding: the animals tuned how quickly they shook to their size. That is to say, the bigger animals shook slower while the smaller ones shook really quickly. That's because they need to exert a certain amount of force on the water droplets to shake them off. For the little guys, that means moving really quickly: a mouse has to shake 30 times per second, a rat 18 times per second, and a cat nine times per second. (Remember the labrador retriever was at about 4 times per second.) 
"The largest animal is 10,000 times heavier than the smallest animal," [David] Hu [of Georgia Tech]  told me, "but the forces on the drops are basically constant across all these mammals."
Check out a wet shaking dog getting dry  in (super slow mo) action:


Pretty cool!

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