Daily Cat Fun Facts

On October 18, 1963, a 2.5 kg Parisian stray named Félicette rode a French rocket to 152 kilometres above Earth, survived 9.5g of force and five minutes of weightlessness, and returned home alive — the first and only cat to ever reach space. Her brain activity was transmitted live via implanted electrodes. She remains unmatched.

That weird lip-curl your cat makes when it sniffs something? That's the Flehmen response — the cat is routing pheromones into a separate organ called the vomeronasal organ (Jacobson's organ) in the roof of its mouth, which bypasses the regular nose entirely and sends signals straight to the brain's emotion and reproductive behavior centers.

Cats lap water using only the smooth tip of their tongue — no scooping. Each lap pulls a thin column of water upward by inertia before gravity can win it back. Domestic cats do this 4 times per second, closing their mouths at the exact optimal moment. Confirmed by MIT, Virginia Tech, and Princeton in Science (2010).