the last days of the dinosaurs by riley black

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. As Yong writes, “The act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound.” ( Carlyn Kranking)Īn Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us Perhaps, though, in imagining what other creatures experience, we are creating an experience that’s uniquely our own. An Immense World is about diversity, not superiority. The book does not belittle our visual abilities compared to animals that see a wider range of colors, nor does it hold humans in higher esteem for our sensory triumphs, such as having an exacting sense of smell. For example, our visually centered society has erected artificial lights that disorient migrating birds and hatchling sea turtles. But many creatures’ senses have been thrown off by human activity, he notes. And hammerhead sharks have receptors that scan the seafloor for the electric fields emitted by hidden prey, “as one might use metal detectors,” Yong writes. Some butterflies can perceive ultraviolet color patterns on their wings that distinguish them from other species. Scallops, for example, have up to 200 eyes with impressive resolution, but their brains are likely not complex enough to receive and process such crisp images. Through interviews with scientists around the globe, Yong teases out the astonishing details of other animals’ perceptions, introducing us to their fantastic Umwelten.

But every creature on Earth has its own Umwelt that we can scarcely imagine. As humans, we move through the world within our Umwelt-a term for subjective sensory experience Yong borrows from the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. In An Immense World, science journalist Ed Yong dives into the vast variety of animal senses with a seemingly endless supply of awe-inspiring facts. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong For a deep look into reproductive anatomy or a memoir connecting music to physics, check out some of Smithsonian magazine’s favorite science books of 2022. From those, our editors and contributors have picked ten favorites that explore our universe through the lens of creatures ranging from a tiny virus to a dedicated anthropologist to extinct dinosaurs. In between the breaking news stories, we dug into longer works on a variety of fascinating scientific disciplines. And the James Webb Space Telescope unfolded to capture breathtaking images of our universe. Mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) spread around the United States, while global deaths from Covid-19 topped six million. Researchers discovered lost cities in the Bolivian Amazon after flying over the rainforest. This year in science was filled with amazing discoveries, sobering stats related to mounting illness and death from viruses, and major technological achievements in space.

The last days of the dinosaurs by riley black