Senses

20 articles
  • elephant feet hero

    Seeing Electricity, Hearing Magnetism & Other Sensory Feats

    For elephants, feet are sensory organs.Martin Harvey, Getty Images Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . It’s pretty obvious that dogs have sharper ears and cats a keener sense of smell than we do. But as powerful these senses are, they are merely keener versions of the ones we humans […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Long, Hard Quest to Create Digital Smells

    Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Of all of the wondrous feats accomplished by Willy Wonka in his candy factory, the most impressive may have been wedging an entire meal into just one unassuming stick of gum: Upon popping it in your mouth and chewing, you’d first taste tomato […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    How Your Brain Gaslights You—for Your Own Good

    Nailia Schwarz via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Runners can tell you that sometimes the last mile of a run seems to feel dramatically longer than the first. This perceptual distortion isn’t limited to brains addled by exercise—it’s a consistent feature of our minds.  When we look […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times

    The 1883 eruption on Krakatoa may be the loudest noise the Earth has ever made.
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

    In most languages, sounds can be re-arranged into any number of combinations. Not so in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.Brian Goodman via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don’t sprout multiple heads, […]
  • Article Image

    The Animals That Taste Only Saltiness

      Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Taste plays an important function for most animals far beyond enriching their culinary experiences. At its most basic level, it’s a last-ditch defense against poison, telling the eater whether to swallow or spit out a mouthful of potentially lethal material.Humans can detect […]

  • fish

    Strange Eyeless Fish Creates Its Own Sonar Signals to “See”

    The blind cavefish alongside two of its sighted relativesImage Courtesy of NYU Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Deep in some pitch-black, underwater caves in Mexico, there lives a peculiar little pinkish-white fish. Only about four inches long, this albino has taste buds on the outside of its lower […]

  • Hands touching

    So Human, So Beautiful

    I look into the mirror and try to see what another human would see. My beard is months old, scraggly and dirty, my balding head covered with wisps of gray. I take out the scissors and start to clean it up. Thoughts of other people, being with other people, force their way to the surface, […]

  • Article Image

    Animals’ Wildly Varying Reactions to the Smell of Death

    Cadaverine and putrescine are the chemicals responsible for the dead-flesh stench.

  • Article Image

    Hearing Hadrons, and Doing Research by Ear

    Animation of data from collisions at the LHCCERN Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Several years ago, particle physicist Lily Asquith was hanging out with a few musician pals in London after a band rehearsal, doing impromptu impersonations of what she thought the various elementary particles might sound like, […]

  • Article Image

    1-Trick Chameleon: Predators Learn to See Through Camouflage

    Probably the worst thing to happen to you, if you’re an animal playing the game of life, is to be eaten by some bigger beast. If you’ve already managed to successfully reproduce by then, as far as evolution is concerned, maybe it’s OK for you to shuffle off that mortal coil. Still, I imagine it’s […]

  • green rat snake

    How Animals Use Smell to Send Coded Messages

    Dad was back. He played a little with the children, rubbed a few heads with his own, clawed at a wooden post, and then, standing erect with tail straight up, he backed towards a tree, sprayed, and left. The kids scampered over. They stood on their hind legs and carefully examined the spray—the family smell. […]
  • Baby looking

    Depth Perception & Death Prevention: Babies’ Visual Instinct

    We humans take a lot for granted. Pizza delivery, email, smartphones, dishwashers. All of this occurs in the background, making our lives simpler. None of it requires any explicit effort. Our minds also do a lot of subconscious work that we take for granted. Have you ever seriously thought about how you know that the […]
  • ch4_posthuman_HERO

    Ask a Cyborg

    Profile subject Neil Harbisson is coming to Twitter to talk about merging with technology.
  • ch4_smell_HERO

    Following One Reader’s Nose

    The variability in how people smell has a lot to do with their genetics.
  • IR_VanGogh

    Looking at Art Through Different Eyes—Like a Bee

    There is more to the world than meets the human eye, a fact that hit home for the 18th-century astronomer Sir Frederick William Herschel when he discovered infrared light—a wavelength of light that lies just outside the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can feel its heat, but we can’t see the light—not without […]