Optics

Moviegoers have long been familiar with the benefits of viewing content on a curved screen. The screen's curvature equalizes the distance that light from the projector must travel, enhancing resolution and brightness while eliminating distortion.

Bowerbirds are perhaps the most intriguing artists of the bird world. Their beautiful constructions are built purely to impress females (they are not nests, as often mistaken to be).

Editor’s Note: “Along the Tiger’s Trail” is a  series about the efforts to monitor tigers and their prey in the Malenad landscape in southwestern India that harbors one of the world's largest population of wild tigers.

"Too late" might be the two most tragic words in English, but what if you could rewind the clock? What if the past was not immutable? Would we regret past bad decisions more or less?

I wrote a post yesterday about the missing fundamental effect. It’s a startling auditory illusion in which your brain hears a note that is lower than any of the notes that are actually playing.

Macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss. Will special vitamin supplements protect your eyes? Nutrition Diva tackels a reader question

In astronomy, bigger is almost always better. The size of a telescope’s aperture (or primary optical element) not only determines how many pesky little photons it can capture, but also the ultimate resolution of the image that can be formed.

Not long ago I came across a piece in the Scientific American archives from the earliest days of very-long baseline radio interferometry, the technique employed by the Event Horizon Telescope.

Our little-known ability to see infrared light could occur when pairs of photons combine their energies to appear as one "visible" photon

Self-correcting screens on smartphones and iPads tailor themselves to a viewer's vision—no glasses necessary

Artists invented illusions hundreds and sometimes thousands of years ago. Today we capitalize on those lessons and apply them to new technologies and formats

Artist Ellen Levy teamed up with neuroscientist Michael E. Goldberg, Director of the Mahoney Center for Brain and Behavior at Columbia University in New York, to apply the concept of change blindness to an interactive art installation.