Don’t cats taste bad when they have to wash their poop?

Don’t cats taste bad when they have to wash their poop?

Sofia Koponen, 6

Cats keep their fur and bottoms clean by licking themselves and using their front paws to wash the head area. The cat’s tongue is very rough. It is covered by three types of spiky tongue bumps, or papillae.

The papillae located on the edges, tip and back of the tongue have taste buds that help the cat taste what it licks.

Most of the tongue does not taste anything because the papillae on the tongue lack taste buds. A cat has a total of about 470 taste buds, while a human has about 9,000. So a cat’s sense of taste is weak compared to a human.

There isn’t really any research data on the matter, but you could imagine that sometimes licking the butt can still taste bad to the cat. Keeping the butt clean is still all the more important. Many other animals also wash their bottoms in the same way, and it doesn’t seem to be particularly repulsive to them either.

Kirsi Juuti

small animal disease specialist veterinarian

Catvet Cat clinic

How far can people see?

Jussi Ihatsu, 6

Man can see very far, but the resolution depends on the distance, the size of the object and the lighting. Since the Earth is round, seeing far is also limited by the horizon.

For example, a 6-year-old’s eyes are at a height of about one meter, so the horizon is about 3.8 kilometers away. So you can see so far without visual barriers. If the observer is about 170 centimeters tall, he can see about 5 kilometers away.

From the top floor of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, at a height of 828 meters, you can see as far as 111 kilometers away. An airplane flying at an altitude of 10,000–12,000 meters can see about 350 kilometers away.

When looking into space, the horizon does not limit the view. The Andromeda Galaxy is the most distant object in the sky that can be seen with the naked eye. It is 2.5 million light years away. One light year is 9.46 trillion kilometers, so that distance is huge!

It is possible to see the Andromeda galaxy because it is a large and bright celestial body. Large telescopes designed for use by astronomers have at their best been able to see no less than 13 billion light-years away.

Mika Harju

specialist in ophthalmology

HUS Eye Clinic

Is white the color?

Elsa Labarthe, 13

Light is wave motion whose different wavelengths appear as colors. Red has the longest wavelength and violet the shortest. White does not have a single wavelength, but contains all wavelengths.

This can be observed by getting a prism device, through which sunlight breaks into all the colors of the rainbow.

We see colors because the surfaces of objects and other matter reflect certain wavelengths of light. Our eyes recognize colors with three different cells. When we see white, all those cell types are activated equally strongly.

In physics, all the colors of the rainbow are counted as colors, because they have their own wavelengths. White or, for example, pink are not counted as colors because no single wavelength corresponds to them. In everyday life, they are still thought of as colors, because our visual system produces its own color impression from them.

Niko Jokela

university lecturer, docent

University of Helsinki and Institute of Physics

Why don’t fish get cold? I get cold when I get out of the shower and I’m wet, and the water in the lake is also really cold now.

Daniel Pikkarainen, 7

Clutter they do sense the cold with the help of the heat-sensing sensory cells in the skin, but they don’t feel the cold in the same way as we do, because they are heat exchangers.

In other words, the fish’s body temperature and vital functions change effectively according to the water temperature. When the water is cold, the fish’s body is also cold, so it doesn’t feel a big temperature difference like we do.

People have a constant temperature, so our body tries to keep the temperature almost the same all the time. That’s why, for example, cold lake water immediately feels cool to us. After showering, the water on the skin also evaporates, taking the heat with it, which is why you start to get cold easily.

The body of many fish species is particularly well adapted to cold water. Their metabolism can slow down, which saves energy and some species can fall into a hibernation-like state. In the cold waters of winter, the body may even shrink a little.

In addition, fish from cold sea areas have special proteins in their cells that prevent the formation of ice crystals. Proteins help to survive in seawater, the temperature of which can even go below zero.

But not all fish are suited to the same cold water. Each species has its own temperatures where it thrives and does well. If the water gets too cold, the fish will try to find a more suitable place for them. So you can say that then the fish got cold.

Teppo Vehanen

docent of fish biology

Natural Resources Center

Send the question, the questioner’s full name and age to lasten.tiedeskö[email protected]. The column is provided by Touko Kauppinen.

Correction 12.12. 6:56 a.m.: The plane is flying at an altitude of 10,000-12,000 meters, not 10,000-12,000 kilometers.