Vision
12 articles-
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 […] -
Why Are We So Obsessed With Mugshot Hotties?
On June 18, a photo of a very handsome man was posted on the Web. It wasn’t intended to “break the Internet” Kardashian-style, but that’s pretty much what happened, if only on a slightly smaller scale. Within 48 hours, the portrait garnered 62,000 “Likes” on Facebook and became an online spectacle. Today the Like count […] -
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 […] -
What We Lose When Film Cameras Change to Digital Ones
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . This is part two of a three-part series about the movie industry’s switch to digital cameras and what is lost, and gained, in the process. Part one, on the traditional approach to filming movies and the birth of digital, ran yesterday; part three […] -
Are Digital Cameras Changing the Nature of Movies?
If film as a medium is not quite dead, it’s definitely on the endangered list.
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The Quest to Understand—and Mimic—Nature’s Trickiest Colors
The West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae)AlessandroZocc via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . It was an image in a book of a sparkly blue fish—a West Indian Ocean coelacanth—that inspired German painter Franziska Schenk to begin a project that would occupy much of her adult life. “It […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Jeepers, Creepers. Where the Heck Did You Get Those Peepers?
Last week, we asked you to pick out human eyes from animal eyes that look similar. It was probably harder than you expected. This week’s eyeball challenge, again courtesy of some great photographs by Suren Manvelyan, might be even harder. Can you tell which very inhuman-looking eyes (bigger images below) belong to which animals? Nautilus […]
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Humanizing Animals With the Most Human Eyes
People place incredible importance on their eyes. They’re arguably our default tool for perceiving the world, and one of the primary ways we remember and describe one another. Your eye color is on your birth certificate, driver’s license, and online dating profile. Those who make eye contact are considered more competent, friendlier, and more professional. Online […]