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.

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.