I love cats and they are exceptionally fine-tuned animals from their vision to sense of balance, sleekness, cleanliness and beauty etc.
Not only is it possible for a cat to survive a fall of 14 stories (or more), a cat is more likely to survive such a fall then one from only four stories (at least according to my freshman physics textbook; like everything else I learned during my freshman year, I trust it to be 100% correct). The reasoning is thus:
A cat has little ability to sense its absolute speed (which makes sense, since any good relativist will tell you that there's no such thing as an "absolute speed"). What a cat does have is a sense of proprioception, which tells the cat how fast it's accelerating. When a cat falls out of a window it begins accelerating at something close to 9.8 m/s; this really freaks the cat out, so it assumed its "I'm in danger" posture. Specifically, it tucks its head in, pulls its feet under its body, and curves its spine. This is a good thing for the cat to do if something has just thrown it; the important parts are towards the inside where they are less likely to get injured upon impact. Unfortunately, it also makes the cat much more aerodynamic.
Curled up like this, a cat cuts through the air suffering very little drag. The low surface area of this shape means the cat has a high terminal velocity (maybe 15m/s?). If it strikes the ground going this fast, it is unlikely to survive (at least not without serious injury).
Luckily, after the cat has fallen seven or eight stories, it begins to closely approach its terminal velocity. This means that the drag due to air resistance is equal to the force of gravity, so the cat is no longer accelerating. This allows the cat to calm down enough to more thoroughly appraise the situation. Cats apparently all have an instinctive understanding of certain laws of physics, or at least they know they're more likely to survive a fall it they spread themselves out. They stretch their legs and neck out, increasing their surface area, which decreases their terminal velocity. This slows the cat down considerably (and makes it look kinda like a flying squirrel). At this slower speed it can easily survive the fall (theoretically from any height, though 32 stories is the highest on record).
Domestic cats originated in Near East
July 1, 2007 All domestic cats are descended from at least five common ancestors from the Near East, Oxford University scientists and their collaborators have discovered. The new research, published in this week’s Science, also suggests that the domestic cat’s ancestors diverged from the ancestors of other populations of today’s wildcats around 130,000 years ago, far earlier than previously suspected.
The scientists studied genetic material from 979 domestic cats and their wild relatives. Professor David Macdonald, Director of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, who led the work at Oxford University, said: ‘In our studies of mitochondrial DNA from these cats we found five distinct lineages dating back a hundred thousand years prior to any archaeological record of cat domestication. These appear to come from at least five female cats from the Near East whose descendants have been transported across the world by humans.’ These five ‘matrilines’ (lines of descent from a female ancestor) were recruited at an unknown time during the last 130,000 years (possibly at different times and places in the Near East) as founders of the modern domestic cats.
Mitochondrial DNA is unusual in that, unlike chromosomes, it is held outside the nucleus of cells in specialised structures called mitochondria. In mammals mitochondrial DNA is inherited only though the mother, so it can be used to trace the female lineage.
The earliest archaeological evidence for cat domestication only stretches back to 9,500 years ago when they are thought to have lived alongside humans at sites in Cyprus. It seems that cats probably domesticated themselves, attracted by the food source of rodents that developed around human settlements when hunter-gatherers originally settled in agricultural villages in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. The team obtained samples of contemporary wildcats carrying the ancestral genes from field studies or museums in Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
Professor Macdonald, who has worked on cats around the world from barnyard cats to lions and cheetah, has devoted more than ten years to the conservation of the Scottish wildcat – Britain’s most endangered carnivore – which is blighted by cross-breeding with feral moggies. He said: ‘The most exciting thing about these genetic insights from the past is that they offer hope for the wildcat’s future. In Scotland we’ve been striving to find a genetic marker to identify Scottish wildcats, and now we have one. In terms of practical conservation our next move is to use this marker to find out how many wildcats are left in Scotland, work we are planning with Scottish Natural Heritage’.
The Wildlife Conservation Research Unit – known as the WildCRU – specialises in the science to underpin practical solutions to conservation problems. Carlos Driscoll, the molecular biologist who undertook the lab analyses, is a doctoral student at the WildCRU. He found that of 108 putative European wildcats, 28 carried mitochondrial DNA characteristic of the genotype shared by domestic cats and their Near Eastern ancestor – and the only way it could have got there was cross-breeding between domestic cats and their wild European relative.
The 21st-century problem is that such cross-breeding now threatens the existence of modern wildcats. Hopefully the team will be able to use the new genetic markers for wildcats in general, and Scottish wildcats in particular, to assist in their conservation. Professor Macdonald said: ‘this is the sort of result that excites us most: a fascinating biological insight that can be used to help solve a practical problem. And, whatever the future holds, the domestication of the cat to complement human civilisation stands out as one of the most successful ‘biological experiments’ ever undertaken by humans.’
