By Mara Grunbaum

Oh, you. You think you’re pretty fancy, don’t you, with your matching pair of eyeballs, your precious optic nerve, your oh-so-sophisticated visual cortex. You think you’re so evolved.

The sea urchins are not impressed.

Though the round, spiny marine creatures have no actual visual organs, they do have light-sensitive proteins that help them “see” well enough to move around, find shelter and avoid predators (well, at least the slow ones). Biologists now think that a sea urchin’s entire body functions as one big compound eye, where photosensitive tissue inside the exoskeleton picks up light that’s filtered by the radiating spines. And the denser an urchin’s spines, the sharper its perception of its surroundings, a new study suggests. So who’s fancy now?

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When Beethoven got frustrated with his deafness and was struggling to hear the music that he had composed, music historians report that he laid his piano down on the floor without the legs and pounded the keys loudly in an attempt to feel the vibrations. Other times, he tried to hear by clenching a stick tightly between his teeth with one end touching the piano so the sound could transfer from the piano to the stick, and then travel through his teeth to finally reach his ear.

We aren’t sure how much of his music he heard this way, but a new device uses some of the same conduction techniques to restore hearing to people who are deaf in one ear. Thanks to a couple centuries of technological enhancement, there are now no sticks involved.

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The walls are alive… with sophisticated sensors that can sniff out potential terrorists, according to Popular Science:

Researchers at brain trust Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing andErgonomics (FKIE) in Wachtberg, Germany have developed a network of “chemical noses” that can not only smell chemicals hidden on a person, but also identify the carrier as he or she moves through a crowded space.

This means that someone entering an airport with individual chemical components, that can be used to make an explosive later, can be tracked right from the door itself.

Sensitive sensors located in walls would “sniff” out the chemicals, triggering a discreet security alarm. The sequence of triggered alarms would allow security personnel to determine which direction the chemical-carrying person was moving, and a software program would zoom in on one individual in the crowd. Cameras all over the airport would track the suspect as he moves and security could then apprehend the person well before he/she reaches the crowded security checkpoints.

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It’s a question you wouldn’t be surprised to hear a toddler ask: Do butterflies have ears? Well yes, yes they do. And one species was recently discovered to have ears on their wings. The blue morpho butterfly from Central and South America has beautiful bright blue wings complete with a simple ear structure that picks up noise and relays it to the brain.

Via MSNBC.com

In the new study, Kathleen Lucas of the University of Bristol in England and her colleagues were interested in the odd-looking hearing membrane that sits at the base of the blue morpho’s wing. The tympanal membrane, as it is called, is oval-shaped with a dome at its center that kind of resembles the yolk at the center of a fried egg, Lucas said.

Researchers determined that the butterflies can distinguish high and low frequencies, uncommon in simple ears, and they speculate this could help them determine if a hungry bird is about to swoop down and attack.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Littlest Butterfly
DISCOVER: The Wired Butterfly
Discoblog: A Butterfly’s Moustache Leads Scientists to a New Species

Image: flickr / DavidDennisPhotos.com

When Julian Asher hears a violin, he sees red wine. However, this Imperial College London professor isn’t crazy: One out of every thousand people is said to experience this neurological condition called synesthesia. It causes two senses to blend together, so that stimulation of one sense triggers an entirely different one, involuntarily and simultaneously.

Here’s a theory on how it works: When one region of a person’s brain talks with another region that is wired to perceive a certain sense, the pathways cross and allow the person to experience “crossed senses.” Synesthesia is different for everyone who has it— some people claim they can smell a sound, while others hear a color, and some can even “taste” words.

The latest research on the topic has come out of Oxford University, where scientists found that people hear low-pitched sounds when they see large, round images. Experimental psychologist Charles Spence asked twelve “non-synesthetes” if they could identify whether an image or tone came first, in order to see how “soft” or “sharp” sounds registered in their brains. The volunteers associated high-pitched sound with angular shapes, and recognized low-pitched sounds when they were shown large dots.

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Short people may be disadvantaged on the basketball court, in the workplace, and when trying to see over large crowds, but they just might be quicker in sensing the world around them—because, well, their signals don’t have to travel as far to get to their brains.

In effect, this means that tall people are living in the past, if only by a tenth of a second. This is all according to neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose essay entitled “Brain Time” suggests that “if the brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive.”

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Think you might have a problem with body odor? Here’s a dose of perspective: A 41-year-old woman in Australia has smelled like rotten fish all her life. The pervasive smell emanates from her sweat, breath, and urine, and cannot be washed off or covered up. After being “sniffed” by doctor after doctor, all of whom waved her off as a hypochondriac or even prescribed vaginal cauterization, she was finally diagnosed with trimethylaminuria, or “fish malodor syndrome.”

Though she can now put a name to her condition, the bad news is that there is no cure. Trimethylaminuria is a rare genetic disorder that prevents the body from producing an enzyme that breaks down trimethylamine, a fishy smelling substance found in foods like  meat, eggs, peas, soy beans, and er, fish. Only about 600 cases of fish malodor syndrome are known in the world. Cutting out trimethylamine from the diet can help, but there is no effective treatment.

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To be an expert is to know something like the back of your hand, or so the saying goes. But science suggests we don’t know our own limbs quite as well as we think.

For years scientists have used “rubber hand illusions” to show how the mind can be fooled: They cover a test subject’s real hand with a towel, and then put a real-looking rubber hand in the place where it should be. After a while, the subjects’ minds get the best of them and they “feel” sensations from the fake hand. In a new study [pdf, subscription required], Oxford University researchers went one step further and showed that the brain can begin to abandon a limb if it thinks it’s got a replacement.

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Earlier this month we wrote that alliteration can help you maintain your memory, and now it seems that patterns are also good for those whose brains are just developing.

Babies’ brains are the most active when they hear words with repeated syllables, according to Judit Gervain from the University of British Columbia, and that my help to explain why their first words are often words like “mama” or “papa.”

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No matter how hard you try, it’s often difficult to cheer yourself up from a funk just by thinking happy thoughts. But making yourself disgusted—that’s easy.

Researchers had already identified the part of the brain that activates when we feel grossed out—the anterior insula and adjacent frontal operculum, or IFO. But a Dutch study has found that even reading or thinking about something disgusting can cause the same region of the brain to light up.

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