If would like to understand how fast a wet dog should shake which will dry, you should watch this video. In case you don’t would like to, you have to watch anyway: It’s jam-packed with cute furry animals shaking in slow motion.

You can fast forward in the course of the formulas for the cash shots

A team lead by Georgia Institute of Technology’s Andrew Dickerson have discovered the universal formula that rules the shaking-to-dry frequency of furry animals. Well, variety of, because it still has correction issues that could be explained by the length of the animal’s fur.

What they found

First, the team filmed and analyzed the motion of dogs shaking the water off. They found, let’s say, that a labrador retriever shakes his body at a frequency of 4.3Hz while a small huski does it at 5.8Hz.

Looking at the frequency difference, they realized that the shaking speed was connected to the radius of the animal’s body. Water is connected to the dog by surface tension, they thought, and the sinusoidal shaking creates centripetal forces that ejects that water off the body. Therefore, the larger the dog’s body radius (R) is, the stronger these forces are on the dog’s skin.

This signifies that smaller furry animals would need to shake faster to realize necessary forces, that’s why a mouse has to shake at 27Hz, while a cat does it at 6Hz. Gazing this knowledge, they discovered that the frequency had to be the R^0.75, with the ” shake frequencies asymptotically approach 4Hz as animals grow in size.”

Correction factor

The team learned that, while this law is correct, there’s a correction factor missing, that may be relataed to the fur itself. I’d imagine that the length, type, and morphology of the hair would play a job in all this in addition.

And yes, I wrote all this to simply have an excuse to look at cute dogs shaking water off (and because my dog Amos told me I need to do it ). [ The net-Dog Shake via Technology Review -Thanks Anna Jane !]

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This post is tagged: centripetal forces, cute furry animals, frequency difference, Georgia Institute of Technology, institute of technology, labrador retriever, universal formula