The new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Bookshop|Amazon) delightfully combines scientific writing with a literary sensibility and a gift for vivid similes. It’s by Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his...
Danil, a ninth-grader in Traverse City, Michigan, says his class is curious about the term baby blue. This color name apparently has to do with the pale eye color of some newborn babies. A poem reprinted in newspapers across the United States in the...
Pepper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, wonders why something valuable to someone is called the apple of their eye. The expression apple of one’s eye dates back to the ninth century. It comes from misunderstanding the pupil of the eye as a sphere and...
Sunny-side up eggs sometime go by the name looking at you eggs, an apparent reference to how the yolk in the middle of the egg white makes them resemble eyes. A similar idea appears in the German name, which translates as “mirror egg,” and in...
The glow in the eyes of some animals is called eyeshine, and the adjective that describes such shimmering in a cat’s eyes is chatoyant, from French for “cat.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Eyeshine” At the top of the show, we...
Pun alert: if you have a bee in your hand, what’s in your eye? Beauty. Think about it. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Bee Pun” Grant, I have a question for you. Yes, please. If you have a bee in your hand, what do you have in...