drink
dr. dolittle | September 3, 2015A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences provides evidence that hummingbird tongues act like micropumps when drinking nectar. This finding is in contrast to the long-held belief that their tongues use capillary action to pull in fluids. A team of researchers from the University of Connecticut used high-speed film to capture 18 species of wild hummingbirds as they drank from special transparent feeders. They made sure to mimic wildflowers by developing feeders with similar shapes, volumes and concentrations of nectar as the real thing. What they…
dr. dolittle | December 5, 2014 Image from Scientific American (Credit: S Gart, J Socha, Vlachos, Jung)
I have to be honest. I have always wondered whether my dog actually got any water in his mouth. It always seemed to me that the majority of water ends up on my floor. High speed video collected and analyzed by a team of researchers from Virginia Tech (Sean Gart, Jake Socha and Sunghwan Jung) and Purdue University (Pavlos Vlachos) has shown exactly how a dog is able to drink water...and also explains why they are so messy doing it. Their research was presented at the 67th Annual Meeting of the American Physics Society…
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2013Sweden used to have its own version of Irish Coffee: kaffekask. It was big in the 19th century and I believe it dropped from favour during our 1917-55 period of liquor rationing. Nobody seems to drink kaffekask anymore.
A kask is a type of helmet like the ones worn by English bobbies. But that's apparently not the etymology of kaffekask. More likely it comes from Low German karsch, "harsh", "abrasive".
Kaffekask consists only of coffee and 40% (70° proof) potato schnapps plus optionally a sugar cube per cup. Swedish schnapps (brännvin, "burn wine") is usually flavoured and does not to my…