Science News

Here's a tongue-twister for you: Crafty cuttlefish can complete contours to carefully choose camouflage.

As neurologist V.S. Ramachandran writes in his book The Tell-Tale Brain,"Even though our picture of the world seems coherent and unified, it actually emerges from the activity those thirty (or more) different visual areas in the cortex, each of which mediates multiple subtle functions." Watch the video

Researchers have developed an artificial retina that has the capacity to reproduce normal vision in mice. While other prosthetic strategies mainly increase the number of electrodes in an eye to capture more information, this study concentrated on incorporating the eye’s neural “code” that converts pictures into signals the brain can understand. The research was presented at Neuroscience 2010, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world’s largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

Our senses of sight and hearing work closely together, perhaps more than people realize, a new UCLA psychology study shows.

What exactly does it mean to be color blind? People have varying misconceptions about this–the most common forms of color blindness doesn’t mean that you can’t perceive any color, or that you see the entire world in grayscale. What it really means that their total color space is skewed.

This Sensory Substitution Device uses the camera to gather visual data and then uses a rather nifty computer algorithm to translates this data into sound.

With their keen vision and deadly-accurate pounce, jumping spiders are the cats of the invertebrate world. For decades, scientists have puzzled over how the spiders’ miniature nervous systems manage such sophisticated perception and hunting behavior. A new study of Adanson’s jumping spider (Hasarius adansoni) fills in one key ingredient: an unusual form of depth perception.

A question confronting neuroscientists and computer vision researchers alike is how objects can be identified by simply "looking" at an image. But teaching a computer to "know" what it's looking at is far harder.