MOLES feel their way through their dark, subterranean world with their noses, and that takes a very special kind of nose. Their specialised snouts turn out to be exquisitely adapted to balancing the competing demands of being highly sensitive and yet handling the knocks of abrasive soil.
The tips of moles’ noses are covered in tiny bumps less than a tenth of a millimetre across known as Eimer’s organs. They have a rich supply of nerves and have long been presumed to be touch receptors. Now a team led by Kenneth Catania, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has confirmed this by injecting star-nosed…
