BORN EXTRAORDINARY: The Real Science Behind Animal Superpowers

What if the most advanced technology on Earth wasn't built in a laboratory — but evolved over millions of years?A bat navigates a pitch-black cave at sixty kilometers per hour, detecting a wire one millimeter wide using nothing but sound. A cuttlefish matches any background in under two hundred milliseconds — while being completely colorblind. A monarch butterfly crosses a continent guided by quantum chemistry in its eyes. An axolotl grows back its own brain. And in the deepest ocean, living creatures produce cold light with an efficiency no human engineer has matched.Born Extraordinary takes five of nature's most astonishing capabilities and examines them with full scientific rigor: what is actually happening at the physical, cellular, and neurological level, which animals have mastered each ability and how, and what human technology has learned — or is still trying to learn — from each one.The five parts cover:Echolocation — the ultrasonic sonar of bats and dolphins, the physics behind it, and how it gave us military sonar and medical ultrasoundCamouflage — the active skin displays of cuttlefish and octopuses, the masquerade of leaf insects, and the engineering challenge of replicating what cephalopods do effortlesslyMigration — the bar-tailed godwit's nonstop Pacific crossing, the monarch's multigenerational navigation, and the quantum mechanics inside a migratory bird's eyeRegeneration — the axolotl's ability to regrow its heart, spinal cord, and brain, the effectively immortal hydra, and the state of regenerative medicineBioluminescence — the cold light of the deep sea, the synchronous fireflies of the Smoky Mountains, and how a jellyfish protein became one of the most important tools in the history of biologyThis is popular science at its most precise — not content to say that animals are remarkable, but committed to showing exactly why, and exactly how remarkable they are. Understanding does not diminish wonder. It is wonder's most stable form. Read more