AKA The Art of the Hunch
Mouse guard hair found to resemble manmade optical sensors, suggesting heat sensing ability
Dec 2021, phys.org
This story was brought to you by Bob Yirka, who has been writing for the science news aggregator "phys.org" for a long time now. It's more than just a science news article, it's a story about how science really happens.
The finding is from a camera-imaging specialist working for a national defense contractor. He found that the same hair-like optical sensors they use for their equipment are found in mice. But the way he found it was pure scientific passion, the kind of science that happens when you can't help but do science even when you're not officially science-ing at work.
He was using some camera gadgets at home, just to watch the local wildlife. He noticed that mice predators were acting funny, it seemed like they were trying to hide their body heat while attacking. And then he had a hunch.
He started looking at the hairs on the mouse's skin, and he found some that looked familiar to the hairs on his hi-tech optical equipment. He measured the hairs, and they were spaced the same distance as the waves in heat radiation (10 microns apart). He looked at other similar animals, and they had the same tiny hairs.
Maybe they can sense heat with the hairs on their body.
via British defense company Leonardo U.K. Ltd.: Ian M. Baker, Infrared antenna-like structures in mammalian fur, Royal Society Open Science (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.210740
Totally unrelated image credit: Droplet of Mercury, MIT, 2022
Post Script:
This is also somewhat an example of what I imagine will happen over the next several years following a global pandemic, where scientists, engineers, artists, designers and workers of all kinds either died, became disabled or just quit their jobs, taking with them a hard-to-count number of years of experience with them. Loss of institutional knowledge. Institutional amnesia. And then, a whole new crop of people, either new to the job with nobody to train them, or switching from one career to another in an almost totally different field. This is what's happening now, in the peri-pandemic world -- it's both bad, because we lose all that knowledge and experience, but it's good because there will be really weird discoveries and new ways of doing things popping up all over the place, probably too small for us to notice all at once, but it's happening nonetheless.
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