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."
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Maybe, mabe not... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a graduate student doing some "tabletop science" in the lab. His specialty in the lab is "Animal Cleaning" http://www.me.gatech.edu/hu/Research/lab.html [gatech.edu] . I doubt he's trying for anything except his thesis.
I'd say he did a pretty good job building a preliminary predictive model and testing against that model and refining it. And it stands to reason that animals shaking water out of their fur might be of interest to him, since he probably bathes animals on a pretty regular basis and observes the behavior a lot. Building lab time researching something that interests you sounds pretty good to me.
It'll probably never cure cancer or give us faster-than-light drives, but most graduate student lab work is done with little expectation of changing the boundaries of science as we know it.
Re:One of mankind's biggest questions... (Score:2, Interesting)
My question was, "Can you stop a dog from shaking once it started?"
I had to give my dog baths all the time when I was a kid. Of course the first thing he would do is shake him self off once he was out of the bath. One time, out of curiosity, I stopped him mid-shake by holding the back part of his body (since the shake from head to tail). I held him for about a minute and then let him go. He finished his shake starting from the point he was at before I stopped him in the middle. Over the course of the next few months, it tried increasing lengths of time but no matter how long I held him, he would finish the shake starting at the point where I stopped him. The last time I did it, I held him for 30 minutes. That still did not stop him. Got bored after that.