Optics

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.

Editors Note: Members of the Extreme Ice Survey team are returning to South Georgia Island and the Antarctic Peninsula to maintain time-lapse camera systems.

The facts and fictions of crimson perception

Nikon’s Small World photo competition celebrates its 40th anniversary

Reported in Scientific American This Week in World War I: October 10, 1914 Drones are at the forefront of warfare in the 21st century. These unarmed and unpiloted aircraft, big and small, circle far above the battlefield, collecting images and reporting back to headquarters, electronically.

An invisible particle's discovery was honored in 2013, but this year the ubiquitous LED takes its place on the Nobel rostrum

Stefan W. Hell, Eric Betzig, and William Moerner share the prize for developing new ways to see inside a cell.

Here in North America, we are in the midst of a tetrad of lunar eclipses, the second one visible Wednesday morning. A tetrad of lunar eclipses means that there are four total lunar eclipses in a row.

Excitement is building — at least in science circles — for the upcoming announcements of the 2014 Nobel Prizes, along with the inevitable speculation about who might be among this year’s winners.

The eyeless cavefish saves energy by freezing its circadian rhythm

Editor's Note: Veteran science journalist Philip Hilts is working and diving with a team of archeologists, engineers and divers off the shore of Antikythera, a remote Greek island, where a treasure ship by the same name sank in 70 B.C.