Read the following passage .

A. It was known that when cats lap, they extend their tongues straight down toward the bowl with the tip of the tongue curled backwards, so that the top of the tongue touches the liquid first. That insight came from a 1940 film of a cat lapping milk, made by Harold "Doc" Edgerton, the MIT electrical engineering professor who first used strobe lights in photography to stop action.

B. But recent high-speed videos made by MIT, Virginia Tech and Princeton researchers reveal that the top of the cat's tongue is the only surface to touch the liquid. Cats, unlike dogs, don't dip their tongues into the liquid like ladles. The cat's lapping mechanism is far more subtle and elegant. The smooth tip of the tongue barely touches the surface of the liquid before the cat draws its tongue back up. As it does so, a column of liquid forms between the moving tongue and the liquid's surface. The cat then closes its mouth, pinching off the top of the column for a nice drink, while keeping its chin dry.

C. When the cat's tongue touches the liquid surface, some of the liquid sticks to it through liquid adhesion, much as water adheres to a human palm when it touches the surface of a pool. But the cat draws its tongue back up so rapidly that for a fraction of a second, inertia — the tendency of the moving liquid to continue following the tongue — overcomes gravity, which is pulling the liquid back down toward the bowl. The cat instinctively knows just when this delicate balance will change, and it closes its mouth in the instant before gravity overtakes inertia. If the cat hesitated, the column would break, the liquid would fall back into the bowl, and the tongue would come up empty. 

D. While the domestic cat averages about four laps per second, the big cats, such as tigers, know to slow down. Because their tongues are larger, they lap more slowly to achieve the same balance of gravity and inertia. Roman Stocker of MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), Pedro Reis of CEE and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sunghwan Jung of Virginia Tech and Jeffrey Aristoff of Princeton analyzed high-speed digital video of domestic cats, including Stocker's family cat and a range of big cats (a tiger, a lion and a jaguar), thanks to a collaboration with Zoo New England's mammal curator John Piazza and assistant curator Pearl Yusuf. And, in what could be a first for a paper published in Science, the researchers gathered additional data by analyzing existing YouTube.com videos of big cats lapping.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.