With the winter Olympics wrapping up, many athletes competed in snowboarding where they twisted their bodies around while doing flips. Curiously, the moves of snowboarders is no different than the movements of cats when they fall and land on their feet.
“A simple model for how a cat flips over is if you picture it as being a front half of a cat and a back half of a cat, so that the torso is two parts. It can bend its body sort of counterrotate the front and back half of the body,” said Greg Gbur, a physicist at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
So if snowboarders want to sharpen their skills, they should study cats. Perhaps when snowboarder wins a medal at the next Olympics, they’ll be allowed to bring their cat to the podium to accept their award.
To read more about the science of snowboarding and cats, click here.
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