Blinding Myself with Science

I've been admiring these tulips for almost a decade, and I never noticed the iridescent butterfly wing blue color in the center. I saw it first through the camera lens, then I was able to see it with my naked eye, once I knew to tilt the flower and look for it.

The iridescence is caused by little grooves that refract light like the back of a cd, and enhance the flower's pollinating power by lighting the blossom up like a neon sign to attract customers. They are  using light as a tool, which is pretty cool.

Not all of them use this trick of evolution. but maybe they have a trick we can't see yet.

I am constantly amazed at the things we do not see or hear or know due to the limitations of our eyes, ears and minds. Here's a little mindboggling graphic of the limitations of our sight. That little rainbow is the only part of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can see with our eyes.

Fortunately, we can thank science for the equipment that lets us see the other stuff, like x-rays, the weather radar or this image from the Herschel Infrared Satellite:



Thanks to technology, we can eavesdrop on the conversations of whales and elephants, or bats who use frequencies we can't even hear. The Indonesian elephants who ran for high ground before the tsunami made landfall heard the subsonic frequencies made by the giant wave.

Here's some fun facts on hearing ranges, and don't think I'm not sick with the knowledge of the frequencies of hearing I've already lost.

Hearing Range (young adult human) = 20 to 20,000 Hz
Hearing Range (elderly human) = 50 to 8,000 Hz
Hearing Range (rat) = 1,000 to 50,000 Hz
Hearing Range (cat) = 100 to 60,000 Hz
Hearing Range (dolphin) = 200 to 150,000 Hz
Hearing Range (elephant) = 1 to 20,000 Hz
Hearing Range (goldfish) = 5 to 2,000 Hz
Hearing Range (moth, noctuid) = 1,000 to 240,000 Hz
Hearing Range (mouse) = 1,000 to 100,000 Hz

This one makes me crazy, because I can barely hear a thing and my kids find it excruciating. It's the latest rage in parent proof stealth ring tones.



How about smell? I've lost a huge range in my ability to smell as I've aged. Bad development for smelling flowers, but good for missing out on body odors and trash.

Number of human olfactory receptor cells = 12 million
Number of rabbit olfactory receptor cells = 100 million
Number of dog olfactory receptor cells = 1 billion
Number of bloodhound olfactory receptor cells = 4 billion
(Shier, D., Butler, J. and Lewis, R. Hole's Human Anatomy & Physiology, Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004)


Humans got the big brains, but they didn't get all the options, did they?

Here's what really gets my brain cramping:

What else is there to know that we do not yet know because of our limitations as humans?

I'm petrified that a growing percentage of humans choose to ignore or deny the science we have discovered. I'm equally petrified that of the developing nations we are ranked 25 in math and 20 in science. I know this because we watched the Masters golf tournament this weekend and were bombarded with commercials for the Math and Science Initiative sponsored by Exxon-Mobil.

It's a strange new world we live in, isn't it, my friends?

When I get overwhelmed, I'll just go outside and try to smell some flowers.