Ed Yong

speaker

354 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 25 Sep

Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Science Vs · How to Smell like a Dog, with Ed Yong · 25 Sep 2025 podcast

And they're listening for those echoes bouncing off objects in the world around them.

And by timing how long it takes for the sound to go out and to return, the bat can translate that time into distance.

Daniel is basically doing exactly the same thing.

His clicks are not ultrasonic like those of a bat.

So they provide a little less information to him.

But it's basically the same thing.

He is using the timing of rebounding sound to map the world around him.

So it felt amazing.

It is very easy to watch Daniel and to think of this as some kind of superpower.

But like every way of sensing the world, it has some strengths and it has drawbacks too.

It's really bad for anything that involves a small thing against a large thing.

So if I wanted to hide from Daniel, I would stand right up against a wall.

And the thing is, bats also suffer from this problem.

Bats really can easily detect a moth in air.

But if the moth is sitting on a leaf, most bats will really struggle to find it.

So one of my favorite stories that Daniel told me is that...

He was once asked to try and tell the difference between two objects that to him sounded exactly the same.

One was a stuffed bear, like a teddy bear, and the other was a champagne bottle.

And...

Those obviously look different to us, but they both distort and muffle echoes in different ways.

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