Digital Wanderer

In the magazine "In the World of Science"(Scientific American) in the latest? issue, there's an article about bird vision. It talks about how birds see ultraviolet and all the shades formed by mixing it with the other colors. This is because birds have four types of cones, while humans only have three (other mammals just have two, so we're lucky).
This wouldn't be all that interesting, but the article contains a few extremely fascinating things that are actually obvious, but which I had never thought about before.

First of all, color is the brain's representation of light's wavelength. That is, there are no colors "in reality," and the fact that we see them is the brain's way of letting us know which waves an object reflects and which it doesn't. If you think about this for a bit, it gets uncomfortable. It turns out that the subjectivists (or whatever they're called) are right about a lot of things when they say that the world exists only in the mind of the observer.
On the plus side, you could say that wavelength exists objectively, so it's not a tragedy (I know, I know, it's  not that simple here either). It's just unpleasant how dependent we are on such a glitchy and approximate instrument as the human brain.
The words practically beg to be spoken: "Bring on universal cyborgization! Glory to the robots!". 
One can only hope that in a few decades we'll use genetic engineering to deal with the annoying flaws of our consciousness's biological storage unit, and cyborgization won't be necessary.

The second curious fact from the article is the phrase "birds see ultraviolet". When a person hears this, they subconsciously assume the following nonsense: it's a color that, in the spectral band from a physics textbook, sits past violet and looks kind of violet-y too. In reality, it's a color that we are incapable of imagining. We have a classic situation from sci-fi novels, where we are unable to comprehend how some alien race perceives and understands the world. Except that the role of the alien and suspicious extraterrestrials is played by our cute little birdies.
The article also mentions that for 136 species of birds, ornithologists previously considered the coloring of males and females to be identical. After the aforementioned study, they figured they should take a look with an ultraviolet video camera. And started tearing their hair out, because those 136 species of birds don't consider themselves identical in the slightest.
On the bright side, it's worth noting that with the help of instruments, humans can at least very roughly understand how ultraviolet affects the perception of those who see it.

The third fact - how strongly science contradicts all sorts of holy scriptures. Supposedly, humans are perfect, right? But it turns out that a simple sparrow sees a billion more shades, and not just shades, but ones that a human can't even imagine.