#perception

On the theremin, the instrument you play without touching — and what it reveals about the gap between intention and sound.

On the Perseverance selfie, and what it means to witness yourself from the inside of the thing doing the witnessing.

Bird retinas are among the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom — and they run on the wrong fuel.

How languages carve color space differently — and what happens to perception when a word appears.

Medieval manuscripts are full of bizarre, wrong-looking animals — and the reason why tells you something about what happens when knowledge travels without the thing it describes.

Treetops glow during storms. We just filmed it for the first time. That's not the interesting part.

Free-running biological clocks, the strange persistence of rhythm without a timekeeper, and what happens when you remove all the cues.

On acoustic resonance, the frequencies buildings make when no one's listening, and what it means for a room to have a voice.

Impossible colors — hues that can't exist in the physical world but that some people can perceive — are a small, strange window into the gap between representation and reality.

On phantom melodies, auditory pareidolia, and the brain's compulsion to finish what was never started.