
New sense discovered in dog noses: the ability to detect heat - pseudolus
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/new-sense-discovered-dog-noses-ability-detect-heat
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dvtrn
_But dogs’ rhinaria are moist, colder than the ambient temperature, and richly
endowed with nerves—all of which suggests an ability to detect not just smell,
but heat._

Interesting, I wonder if this has anything to do what looks like dogs licking
their own noses when they get super excited, among other behaviors. Or at
least my girl does, and I’ve always wondered what that was about.

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hnick
Humidity helps smells travel. People doing dog sports that involve scent may
have a spray bottle to moisten the dog's nose before their turn.

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hikarudo
"All sensors are temperature sensors."

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thunderbong
That's interesting! Never thought of it like that. Source? Original?

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hikarudo
Not original, and I haven't been able to find out the author.

My background was originally in electrical engineering, where this is probably
more widely known than in computer science.

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0_____0
Ha! hadn't heard that before but yep. CO2 sensor? photodiode? have a temp
dependency. the nice ones are compensated and maybe give a coarse temp readout
if i2c/spi enabled...

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goldenkey
Technically if it is sensing infrared light directionally, it can be
considered a crude low frequency eye?

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ComputerGuru
It might be stated even more interestingly than that, because it’s
“directionally but not directly,” meaning it’s almost a “warp vision” picking
up scatters and “seeing” around corners, right?

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thaumasiotes
Sure, in the same sense that a mirage allows your eyes to see around corners?

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pvaldes
I just realized now that dogs love to investigate thoroughly the two warmer
areas of humans and other dogs. Around the mouth, and the other place.

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frandroid
Good god, it's called the crotch.

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jjtheblunt
There's a text snippet autocomplete wouldn't predict.

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pazimzadeh
Hair bundle cells of the inner ear can also sense heat:

Thermal Excitation of the Mechanotransduction Apparatus of Hair Cells
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29395911](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29395911)

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ebg13
What a weird article. Humans can also detect heat. So is this is just about
how some animals are more sensitive than others? Because I'm 100% certain that
nobody in history has ever said "dog noses don't feel temperature".

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dhosek
It's not merely sensing heat, but sensing weakly radiating heat from a
distance. The human researchers could only distinguish the test and control
objects by touching them.

Did you actually read the article?

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ebg13
Humans also sense radiative heat from a distance. The only difference
explicitly stated in the article is degree of sensitivity not a new sense.

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wintermutesGhst
I think degree of sensitivity, discrimination, or directionality can warrant
counting a 'new sense'. I would consider my sense of thermoreception to be
different from that of a snake's heat-pits, or hearing to be a different sense
from feeling vibrations.

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frandroid
As the article about epistemology posted yesterday mentioned, at some point, a
difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

