[ad_1] A Kanizsa triangle. | Photo Credit: Fibonacci (CC BY-SA) A: Our brains fall for optical illusions because of the ways in which they perceive the world, including using contextual information, shortcuts, and predictions. Among other patterns, the brain assumes light comes from above, fills missing edges, and exaggerates contrasts. While these tricks help us navigate the world, sometimes they

[ad_1] Ice is almost everywhere on the earth — in glaciers, snow, and clouds. Despite being so common, it still hides mysteries about its physical properties. A long-standing puzzle concerns its electrical behaviour. Every water molecule is polar, meaning it has a positive and a negative end. But when water freezes into ordinary hexagonal ice (known as ice Ih), the

[ad_1] Examples of Early and Middle Holocene human burials from southern China. This figure shows six human burials from Huiyaotian in Nanning and Liyupo in Long’an, both shell-midden sites located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. | Photo Credit: PNAS 122 (38) e2515103122 Archaeologists working in southeast Asia have long been puzzled by pre-farming burials dating from about 12,000 to

[ad_1] While pigments interact with light and their surroundings to produce specific colours, the hex triplet #1099D6 (shown) approximates what manganese blue might have looked like. | Photo Credit: Google Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 is one of the most famous examples of action painting, where paint is dripped, splashed, and layered onto a surface. While art historians and scientists

[ad_1] These days, an inky, sightless night is a rare sight in much of the world. From the harsh glare of streetlamps that make us squint to the gaudy flicker of neon billboards that force sunglass shields, artificial light is blurring the line between day and night. This has meant birds stay active for almost an hour longer after sundown

[ad_1] In a small persimmon orchard in northern Greece, scientists carefully open paper bags to release thousands of flies, in an experiment aimed at blunting the destructive impact of new invasive species. The insects are sterile male Mediterranean fruit flies (Ceratitis capitata), a pest that annually causes significant damage to crops in Naousa, where a large proportion of Greece’s prominent