How Magic Tricks Help Us Understand Animal Minds
By performing tricks for birds, monkeys and other creatures, researchers hope to learn how they perceive and think about their world
Betsy Mason is a freelance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a 2022 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow reporting on how the science of animal minds is changing how we think about us and them.
How Magic Tricks Help Us Understand Animal Minds
By performing tricks for birds, monkeys and other creatures, researchers hope to learn how they perceive and think about their world
Spiders Seem to Have REM-like Sleep and May Even Dream
Jumping spiders have REM-like twitches when they sleep, suggesting dreams may be much more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously realized
The Topography of Disease
A 19th-century doctor famously mapped cholera’s toll to try and understand its origin and spread—but that's only part of the story
End of the Rainbow? New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind
The improved palette also avoids some of the problems existing data visualization schemes pose for people with typical vision