Expanding Our Umwelt: Understanding Animal Experiences
Science Friday1 Feb 2024

Expanding Our Umwelt: Understanding Animal Experiences

Take a quick moment to think about your surroundings. Tune into your senses, and contemplate what’s happening around you. What do you see, hear, and smell? Now take a moment to imagine: What if you were a bat? How would you experience your environment differently? Maybe you could sense a nearby spider through echolocation, or feel minute changes in air pressure and temperature to know where to fly next. This world of perception is unique to each organism. It’s what scientists call umwelt, from the German word meaning “environment” or “surroundings,” and it is the subject of this month’s SciFri Book Club pick.

Science writer, author, and birder Ed Yong returns to talk about how senses both familiar and foreign to us help animals experience their environment, and to tell us what he’s learned in the past year since his book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us (now available in paperback), was published.

The SciFri Book Club read An Immense World together this January, and readers joined Yong and guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross via a live Zoom Call-in for a conversation on how writing about animals changed his experience in nature, how educators can help students become better connected to the Earth, and how readers are still connecting with his work on the umwelten of the animal kingdom.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(1383)

Making a case for physicists to join climate research

Making a case for physicists to join climate research

When you think of physics, your mind might go to forces—like gravity, friction, and magnetism—or to astrophysics, like galaxies and exoplanets. But many of the same principles used to understand how t...

20 Aug 12min

Creating 'world models' for robots + An AI math shakeup

Creating 'world models' for robots + An AI math shakeup

When you ask an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude a question, the model goes through its massive amount of training data and guesses the answer by mathematically predicting the word most likely to appear nex...

19 Aug 17min

What can moments of lucidity teach us about Alzheimer’s?

What can moments of lucidity teach us about Alzheimer’s?

Watching a loved one with Alzheimer's or dementia slowly lose their cognitive abilities can be heartbreaking. While the person you once knew seems to be slipping away, sometimes people with Alzheimer'...

18 Aug 17min

Colorado’s snow drought deals a major blow to recreation

Colorado’s snow drought deals a major blow to recreation

Winter in Colorado looked very different this year. Many parts of the state experienced record-high temperatures and record-low snowpack, which had downstream effects on farming, sports, tourism, and ...

17 Aug 11min

How do you find a ‘lost’ species?

How do you find a ‘lost’ species?

The earth is facing a biodiversity crisis, and there’s a lot of attention on species that are threatened, or at risk of dying out completely. But, there’s another critter category that’s a little more...

14 Aug 18min

What we get wrong about vaccine hesitancy

What we get wrong about vaccine hesitancy

President Trump has signed an executive order calling for a change to the childhood vaccination schedule. Specifically, he wants to separate the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and...

13 Aug 12min

Why this lab studies the speed of bug pee and other curiosities

Why this lab studies the speed of bug pee and other curiosities

In a lab in the Rocky Mountains, a group of scientists is hard at work trying to find answers across biology, physics, and engineering: They’re looking into things like the hydrodynamics of insect pee...

12 Aug 18min

Some primates undergo even more extreme childbirth than humans

Some primates undergo even more extreme childbirth than humans

Human childbirth is often difficult and incredibly painful—just ask anyone who’s been through it. And for a long time, childbirth seemed to be uniquely difficult for humans. But a new study suggests t...

11 Aug 11min

Populärt inom Vetenskap

dumma-manniskor
p3-dystopia
allt-du-velat-veta
hacka-livet
rss-vetenskapsradion
ufo-sverige
svd-nyhetsartiklar
bildningspodden
rss-vetenskapsradion-2
barnpsykologerna
rss-spraket
det-morka-psyket
halsorevolutionen
vetenskapsradion
medicinvetarna
ufo-sverige-2
rss-ufobortom-rimligt-tvivel
paranormalt-med-caroline-giertz
sexet
rss-kriminologerna