Physicists Discover Universal "Wet-Dog Shake" Rule 97
Dog owners can sleep easy tonight because physicists have discovered how rapidly a wet dog should oscillate its body to dry its fur. Presumably, dogs already know. From the article: "Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of Andrew Dickerson at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a few buddies. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. Dickerson and co filmed a number of dogs shaking their fur and used the images to measure the period of oscillation of the dogs' skin. For a labrador retriever, this turns out to be 4.3 Hz."
One of mankind's biggest questions... (Score:2, Insightful)
Ig Noble... (Score:5, Insightful)
A shit... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe, mabe not... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know how seriously the scientist took this research.
But I do remember that Richard Feynman wrote a paper on the wobbling movement of a spinning plate. He did this because he was depressed and had scientific writer's block. And nobody would deny the importance of his later work.
Science is science. If what they find is correct in the scientific sense, it really doesn't bother me too much.
I'd be worried if scientists started really competing for the Ig Nobel prizes. But I doubt that they ever will :-).
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
I take it that the theory assumes... (Score:4, Insightful)
...a spherical dog of uniform density?
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
What possible application could this research be for?
If they're scientists rather than engineers, the obvious answer is, "Who cares?" ... Perhaps the most distinguishing aspect of "science" is that it's a search for knowledge for its own sake, not tied to a practical application. Engineering research is generally tied to something practical. Scientific research need not be. That's not to say that scientists never take up research that has practical application, just that the mindset of a scientist is that the practical application isn't the ultimate goal: the knowledge itself is. If you're curious about dog-fur-shaking, research it. That's science.
That said, the dynamics of water droplets on fibrous materials probably aren't well understood, given that there are open questions about the dynamics of liquid films on some solid surfaces [1], and there are numerous applications that could be imagined there - filters, absorptive mats, perhaps new methods of creating sprays using some sort of shaking synthetic fibers, etc. If we only studied the questions for which the technological benefit was directly obvious, we'd still be in the pre-industrial era. I don't know if this particular study was well-designed or will provide useful information, but any knowledge has potential to prove valuable, often in areas not directly related to the question that was being studied initially. These studies may sound silly when explained superficially, but that doesn't mean they're worthless.
[1]The breakup and atomization of the shear-driven fuel film on an intake valve at cold start in a PFI gasoline engine, for example, depends on whether the film will separate from the valve surface when it reaches the corner, or flow around the corner and down the side. This is a relatively simple problem, geometrically, but the interplay of surface tension, viscosity, inertia, and the boundary with the air flow is something that current models really didn't handle at all until a year or two ago - the experimental side of the project is something that a couple of the MS students in my research group were working on while I was in grad school. Something as complicated as how the effect of the frequency of the oscillations of the underlying layer to which fibers are attached affects the behavior of droplets clinging to those fibers is more complex, and thus I would guess it's most likely not understood well at all at the level of being able to explain and model it in detail.