Matt Kaplan

speaker

87 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 16 Jun

Matt Kaplan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · No big deal: murky Iran-war negotiations · 26 May 2026 podcast

But shockingly, they see red really, really badly.

And so all of these songs.

the poor birds because they can't see them.

Well, the solution is to do two things.

One, you find a dead grouse, you take apart its eye, and you look at the receptor proteins that are found inside the eyeball, and that tells you what colors the bird can see.

It doesn't tell you very much about contrast, though, and that's where the second part of the experiment that these researchers ran gets interesting.

You put a grouse in a box where it can't move around very much, and you

Have one clear wall along the top of the box.

And then you project onto the ceiling outside of that clear wall, contrasting patterns, and you move them with the video camera back and forth.

Grouse eyeballs don't move very much.

And so a grouse, if it can see the contrast moving along the wall, the grouse has to move its head back and forth.

And so they knew which contrast.

contrasting patterns the grouse could see by watching their head.

If the head moved to follow the pattern, they knew the grouse could see it.

If it didn't move its head, they knew they couldn't see it.

So the grouse have bad vision and they really need stark contrast to be able to see much of anything.

It turns out that the patches on the red head of the grouse actually reflect a ton of ultraviolet.

And while you and I can't see ultraviolet, grouse can.

And so the color that's reflecting off of this animal's head that it can see is ultraviolet.

But the red is lost on it.

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