Stories by Susana Martinez-Conde

The facts and fictions of crimson perception

One consequence of my laboratory's collaboration with stage pickpocket Apollo Robbins is that I am often asked for strategies to thwart pickpockets in the real world.

There is an intersection of art, science and engineering in the works of Lego artist Nathan Sawaya, whose "Art of the Brick" traveling show I visited last weekend at the Discovery Times Square Museum in New York (the exhibition closed Sunday).

The people of Enysbourg lead merry, fulfilled, blissful lives - nine days out of every ten. On each Tenth Day, the country is ablaze with destruction.

Animals can be deceived, but do animals feel wonderment, awe, or sense that they have experienced the impossible?

Superpower your imagination

Portrait photography traverses fact and fancy

Music videos by the alternative rock band OK Go are nothing if not creative. Their previous video "Here It Goes Again" featuring treadmill dancing was mesmerizing, and their newest video, "The Writing's on the Wall", is even more compelling, especially for those of us interested in matters of perception.

Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali was a reader of Scientific American, and created one of his most iconic pieces based on a Scientific American article on face perception.

Recent research published in Current Biology indicates that human parents are subject to a previously unknown "baby illusion" that makes them misperceive their youngest child as smaller than he or she is, regardless of age.

Expanding and contracting circles, mutating colors, and false image matches dominated the 2014 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, held on May 18th in the TradeWinds Island Grand in St.

Take a visual journey through seven prizewinning illusions

Hidden illusions are the Easter eggs of the mind

An homage to David Hubel, a Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist

If you've ever played with Legos, you know that they're all about straight lines and 90-degree corners. Not in this version of Akiyoshi Kitaoka's "Bulge" illusion.

We are happy to announce the 10th anniversary edition of world's Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Submissions are now welcome!

Your brain fills in all kinds of visual gaps

Researchers recommend that dentists and other health practitioners receive training in illusion awareness (my words, not theirs), so that they may counteract these and related perceptual effects.

Sleights of Mind has won the Prisma Prize, an annual science communication award to the best book of the year.

This recent Honda ad showcases some striking versions of classical visual illusions

A team of scientists at the Universities of Rochester and Vanderbilt has found that study participants can see, and follow with their eyes, a ghostly image of their hand, when they wave it in front of their completely occluded eyes.

The brain's resources are limited. By focusing on angles, curves and line endings, your visual neurons can cut corners

Hubel had an irreverent attitude towards science “with a capital S”.

Apollo Robbins (aka The Gentleman Thief) explains and demonstrates the art of misdirection