Interest in birdwatching has been booming, and Ed Yong is one of the millions who have fallen hard. Yong is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer previously of the Atlantic, where he was one of the first journalists to deeply investigate long COVID. He says birding has has a transformative impact on his life in the l

Ian Sample meets Ed Yong, who recently won 2023’s Royal Society book prize for An Immense World, which delves into the incredible world of animal senses. From colours and sounds beyond our perception, to the weird and wonderful ways that animals grow new ears and experience smell, Ed explains why understanding how anim

Bumblebees can’t see red, but they can detect the ultraviolet hue, invisible to humans, at the center of a sunflower. A fly can taste an apple just by landing on it, and a rattlesnake can perceive the infrared radiation emanating from warm-blooded prey. Those are just some of the extraordinary animal senses that scienc

The animal kingdom perceives the world in wild and unusual ways. Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer on staff at The Atlantic, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what seems like animal magic powers – from magnetic fields and sonar to complex vision and heightened smell. His book is “An Immense World: How Animal

Like any animal, humans understand the world through our senses. But unlike other creatures, we can't detect magnetic fields with our bodies, or the flow of water from a fish swimming hundreds of feet in the distance. But Ed Yong wants us to really imagine what it would be like to perceive the world in these ways. In t

For us humans, our overall sensory capabilities - the scope of our sense of smell, our sight, our hearing, and touch - feels all-encompassing, like there’s nothing more that we could possibly conceive of that would change how we experience the world around us. But that’s dead wrong. And this is an illusion that we shar