Vision

Can scarfing carrots really help you see better in the dark?

James DiCarlo is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT who researches visual object recognition in primates.

  // Learn what causes dizziness in this new video from Scientific American‘s Instant Egghead series. In this short movie, I explain how your inner ears work to help you balance, orient yourself and see what’s around you in a stable fashion.

Light triggers a quick neural reaction even in blind people

    Editor’s note: Brain Basics from Scientific American Mind is a series of short video primers on the brain and how we feel, think and act.

At first glance, most eyes look the same. There’s a small opening through which light passes. That light goes through the transparent liquid behind the lens and strikes the retina, a thin film of light-sensitive nerve cells that line the back of the eye.

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

The vanishing octopus is back. This stunning cephalopod, caught on video by Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, has been making the rounds online again.

50 years ago today, Martin Luther King inspired a nation with his I Have A Dream Speech. What if Martin Luther King was never allowed to put his revolutionary dream into action, stifled by an educational climate that promotes conformity, efficiency, and standardization?

Glasses based on a new color vision theory are already being used medically to enhance vasculature and bruising beneath skin. Now they are being tested to aid those with color blindness, although the lenses inhibit the perception of yellows and blues

Several technologies to restore sight to retina-damaged eyes are making headway--one seeks to begin human trials in the U.S. and another has already hit the market in Europe

Yellowing of the eye lenses changes the array of incoming light wavelengths, which can affect circadian rhythms, including sleep patterns. Katherine Harmon reports