As SciAm's Ferris Jabr explains in the video up top, the short answer is: nociceptors. Many animals have these sensory neurons. Some animals have weird ones. Take naked mole rats, for example — NMRs have mutated sodium channels that limit physiologically "normal" nociceptor firing, thereby blunting sensations of pain.

If you're one of those people who can't stop obsessing about David Foster Wallace's confounding, dense novel Infinite Jest — and quite right, too — then there's a brand new resource. William Beutler has created Infinite Atlas, an interactive guide to the version of Boston in Wallace's book, enabled by Google Maps and…

There's only one thing we know for sure about the future: It'll be weird, and you can't really prepare for it. Just imagine trying to tell someone in 2000 how to prepare for life in 2011. But luckily, there's one surefire way to brace yourself for another round of future shock: by reading a slew of great satires, about …

David Foster Wallace wrote one of our favorite science fiction-tinged literary novels, Infinite Jest, so his suicide was a huge loss. Now his papers are on display, and you can read some of his scribbled notes on two genre classics.

Rudy Rucker pushed the boundaries of how much weirdness you could fit into one science-fiction novel, with last year's Postsingular. But the sequel, Hylozoic, goes much further into the realms of the twisted, the disturbing and the post-everything. Warning: spoilers!