For centuries, scientists have tried to uncover one of nature's best-known mysteries: how cats manage to always sit on their feet.
These four-legged friends seem to have an extraordinary ability to turn and spin in the air, always falling straight, no matter which way they fall.
Now, researchers from Yamaguchi University in Japan have solved the puzzle that has baffled physicists and pet owners alike.
According to them, the secret lies in an extremely flexible part of the cat's spine.
In an experiment, published in The Anatomical Record, researchers analyzed the spines of five deceased cats. They found that the thoracic spine, in the middle of the back, is nearly three times more flexible than the lumbar spine, in the lower back.
This allows the cat to quickly rotate its upper body, like a skater on a tight turn, heading towards the ground within milliseconds.
Dr Yasuo Higurashi told the Daily Mail: "The thoracic spine rotates slightly. This movement also helps the lumbar spine, allowing the cat to position its body and sit up."
Physicists have been discussing the “falling cat problem” since the 19th century, when they noticed that cats turned so easily in midair. They were surprised because it seemed to violate the laws of physics – an object cannot start spinning without an external push, according to the law of conservation of angular momentum.
In two centuries, the main theories to explain this phenomenon were three: the tail-propellant, the bend-and-twist, and the tuck-and-turn models.
The first theory suggests that the cat moves its tail strongly in one direction to push its body in the opposite direction. The bend-and-twist model claims that the cat bends its body laterally and rotates the front one way and the back the other. While the tuck-and-turn model suggests that cats alternately bend and extend their legs while turning.
To test this, Dr. Higurashi and colleagues analyzed the spines of cats donated to universities and video footage of cats dropped from a height of 1 meter. They observed that cats rotate their front legs slightly faster than their back legs.
These results support the tuck-and-turn model: cats rotate their upper and lower bodies in opposite directions, retracting their front legs and extending their hind legs, conserving angular momentum and "violating" the laws of physics to always land on their feet. /GazetaExpress/
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