AI Summary
5 min readHack Dog Vision To Keep Your Bones Safe
The shirt Michael Stevens is wearing looks like a plain orange-red garment with white letters that read "NO BONES IN HERE." But there's a second message hidden in green letters on the same red fabric: "JK, I'M FULL OF BONES ACTUALLY." Humans can read both messages. Dogs cannot. Because dogs have dichromatic vision—they see only blue and yellow combinations, and reds and greens look identical to them, likely as browns. So as far as any dog knows, Michael has no skeleton. He calls it the dog safety shirt.
How Animal Vision Works—and What We Miss
The shirt is part of a larger "color vision box" that includes stickers designed to be invisible to dogs: red hearts with green bones, cats, fire hydrants, tennis balls—things dogs would love—rendered in colors they cannot distinguish. The point is not to tease dogs but to teach about the diversity of visual experience across species. Humans typically have three types of cone cells in their retinas, giving us trichromatic vision. Dogs have two. The mantis shrimp has something like nineteen cones. "We don't even know what it sees," Michael says. The rainbow would be an entirely different experience for a mantis shrimp.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Show Opening & Color Vision Introduction** - Michael introduces the topic of color vision in animals and a new product he's wearing.
- 2 (05:38) **The Dog Safety Shirt & Sticker Set** - Michael reveals the full product line designed to exploit canine colorblindness.
- 3 (07:04) **Mantis Shrimp & Human Tetrachromats** - The hosts discuss extreme color vision in other animals and rare human tetrachromats.
- 4 (10:41) **The Ambiguous Coin & Zoetrope Illusion** - Michael shows a challenge coin with a heads/tails ambigram and a spinning animation.
- 5 (12:18) **Origin of the Shirt Idea** - Michael explains how the dog vision shirt evolved from other concepts.
- 6 (14:34) **Upcoming Product: SI Unit Charms** - A preview of a new product line based on standard scientific units.
- 7 (17:35) **Listener Questions: DNA Data Storage** - Dan asks if DNA/RNA can encode data like a hard drive.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Can you hide your skeleton from a dog? Would you want to know the day you’ll die? Has evolution ever come close to producing a real fire breather?
Michael and Hannah test a T-shirt with a secret only humans can see, leading them into the strange world of colour vision, from colourblindness and tetrachromacy, to the remarkable eyes of the mantis shrimp.
They also ask whether DNA could become the ultimate hard drive, visit a data storage mountain in Pittsburgh and discover just how little space all of humanity’s writing might take up.
Send your questions to [email protected] or find us at r/TheRestIsScience.
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