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Truly new sensory experiences are rare. Perhaps for that reason, a whole genre of YouTube videos is dedicated to them. The videos of babies tasting lemons are merely heartwarming. Others—the ones showing deaf people activating their cochlear implants, for example, or blind people, after surgery, seeing for the first time—have a power that’s hard to overstate. (A video of Sarah Churman, a young woman from Texas, hearing her own voice has been viewed more than twenty-five million times.) That power flows from a number of sources. The videos are often filmed by family members who are themselves deeply moved. They involve us in a private, intimate, and life-changing moment. They are unusually frank documents of emotion: one doesn’t often see such extremes of surprise, fear, and joy flow so undisguised across an adult face. And, at the same time, they tell part of a larger, communal story about science and its possibilities. (Perhaps this is why patients and their families are so willing to share these otherwise private moments with the rest of us.)

Here’s a sweet little story of Democracy in Action. A bright eighth grader writes to her state legislator with an idea for a law: Vermont doesn’t have an official Latin motto, so why not adopt one? And for that matter, make it a reference to history? Neato! So state Sen. Joe Benning — a Republican who was actually trying to do a good thing, which he has probably learned to never try again — introduced a bill to adopt the motto “Stella quarta decima fulgeat.” — May the fourteenth star shine bright.” Because Vermont was the 14th state, see? Benning noted that when Vermont briefly minted its own currency, it was engraved with “Stella Quarta Deccima,” so the phrase had real historical cachet.ADVERTISEMENTAnd then Burlington TV station WCAX put the story on its Facebook page with the headline, “Should Vermont have an official Latin motto?” and all Stupid broke loose when morons thought that Vermont was knuckling under to a bunch of goddamned illegal immigrants. Charles Topher at “If you Only News” collected some of the worst of the over 600 comments from some of the geniuses worried about protecting ‘Merca from the invading Latin hordes:

People have long seen faces in the Moon, in oddly-shaped vegetables and even burnt toast, but a Berlin-based group is scouring the planet via satellite imagery for human-like features. What's behind our desire to see faces in our surroundings, asks Lauren Everitt. Most people have never heard of pareidolia. But nearly everyone has experienced it. Anyone who has looked at the Moon and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth has felt the pull of pareidolia. It's "the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist", according to the World English Dictionary. It's picking a face out of a knotted tree trunk or finding zoo animals in the clouds.

Last October we introduced a new feature in which, each Monday morning this school year, we posted a New York Times photograph without a caption, then invited students to answer three deceptively simple questions about it: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? As student answers poured in to the blog each week — this shows someone learning a back-flip; I think he’s in the military because of his camouflage shirt; The background makes it look like a movie set — our collaborators for the feature, Visual Thinking Strategies, acted as live moderators, linking thoughts and posting further questions intended to help them go deeper and see more. Most weeks that created a lively debate in our comments section, as students of all ages, backgrounds and places pushed each other to find detail and defend interpretations.

Kevin Nguyen, sixteen, set his opened eyeglasses on the floor, neatly perpendicular to a nearby wall. He and T. J. Khayatan, seventeen, then stood back to watch what ensued: viewers observing the glasses with the curiosity and respect befitting a work of art—which, under the circumstances, they were.