Webster's Images and Ideas

It turns out that your skin cells employ a shape previously unknown to both biologists and mathematicians... Science Alert: Scientists Have Discovered an Entirely New Shape, And It Was Hiding in Your Cells Gizmodo: The 'Scutoid' Is Geometry's Newest Shape, and It Could Be All Over Your Body The original research article:  Scutoids are a geometrical solution to three-dimensional packing of epithelia The 'scutoid' shape (d) was named in homage to the scutellum    – a posterior portion of the thorax in some insects, which resembles the same mini-triangle shape (e)...  

The Japanese mathematican Kokichi Sugihara has developed this 3D Arrow model: You can can get some idea of what's going on here when he picks it up and shows it from above: ScienceAlert Article on Kokichi Sugihara: This 3D Optical Illusion Will Make You Question The Shape of Reality   More 3D Illusions by Kokichi Sugihara: ScienceAlert: Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion Many other fascinating illusions can be viewed at the... Best Illusions of the Year Website   Creative Sam's Video of the 7 Best Optical Illusions of All Time... Including the Train Illusion which is somewhat like the dancer that spins two ways...

The eye is not merely a window on the world, but a camera and the mind does a lot of processing to produce the world as we see it.  To illustrate this idea, MICHELLE STARR at ScienceAlert has compiled a great set of mindbending optical illusions: Strangest Otical Illusions Known to Science     Here are the pictures mentioned and further information on each one: The Dress - Do you see white and gold or blue and gold?   Wikipedia Article on the Dress  The Non-Red Strawberries Matt Lieberman's Twitter Page on the Strawberries  The cafe wall illusion   Illusion Index Page on the Cafe Wall Illusion  The Illusion Index site also provides information on many other illusions. Curvature blindness illusion Original Article by the discoverer: Curvature Blindness Illusion by Kohske Takahashi   The Spinning Dancer Ragu Kattinakere: Spinning Lady Illusion Explained The...

Two identical street pictures placed side by side suddenly become two different perspectives: The Daily Mail prepared a short video to show these are indeed exactly the same picture:   The informative Daily Mail article goes on to compare this to the famous cafe wall optical illusion where horizontal lines appear to taper or bend: Can You See It? Incredible Optical Illusion Tricks Your Brain     Michael Bach has a fascinating and informative page on the cafe wall illusion: Michael Bach on the Cafe Wall Illusion This page is part of Michael Bach's excellent compendium of visual illusions which is well worth exploring:   Visual Phenomena & Optical Illusions     This illusion is yet another good reminder that the eye is not merely a window.  What we are seeing is in fact a projection within our brains which is influenced by the way our brains work...  Optical illusions show how we see | Beau Lotto ...