Patt Morrison's outfit from her June 5, 2013 Patt's Hats entry. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

There are so many things  I like about this dress – the sleeve length, the boat neck, the fact that it’s navy and not black, and the fact that it wasn’t made in Bangladesh – but mostly it’s the gaily asymmetrical floral design that caught my eye.

The pattern is front and back, and I’m a stickler about those things. It looks like I have been loaded down with festive leis, but also loaded with one too many Mai Tais, so the flower garlands are askew as if I were listing a little bit.

There’s more of my current yellow shoe madness with these very Michelle Obama kitten-heel slingbacks in two different tones of yellow, one a more acid shade and the other more canary, or perhaps chrome yellow. That’s not to be confused with “Crome Yellow,” a very sardonic Aldous Huxley novel parodying the artsy intelligentsia set of 1920s England.

I hope you can see this bracelet. It’s a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry. The Victorians went way, way over the top on this stuff; some of it borders on the ghoulish, with lockets containing elaborately braided locks or even portraits or scenes made entirely from the hair of the deceased. I can admire the artistry but the sentiment can seem excessive. This piece, though, has a black and white enamel border around a tiny fly. Why a fly, I wondered. Then I read the inscription inside:

“From JR to AHR [clearly a husband to a wife] in loving memory of our darling little May Queen, died 7th August 1880, age 14 Mos.”

That inscription made the fly make sense. It’s a mayfly, a creature that lives a few days, or even just a few minutes, and here was this little girl, born in May – hence the May Queen reference to the mythical springtime queen of antiquity -- and died barely a year thereafter. So sweet, so sad, so human, all from an inscription on a bracelet. The girl’s parents are long dead, and so too are any siblings she may have had, but it can touch us more than 130 years later.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

It's 1959. The career of the magician in this marvelous, artfully animated feature film is quickly slipping over the horizon. He is alone, but can still find joy in kindness to a young girl he meets along his tour. Now in limited release.

New York. Eine Stadt an der Ostküste der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika in der Mietpreise von 3.000 Dollar pro Monat keine Seltenheit sind. Eine Stadt, in der Armut von der Insel Manhattan, dem Herzen New Yorks, verdrängt wird und eine Stadt deren Multikultur sich nicht nur in den fast schon legendären Stadtteilen wie Little Italy und Chinatown zeigt.

This week, the guys talk about the Russian novel, Laurus. They discuss issues of transcendence and transformation, hope and healing, and as usual, a big fat dose of death and resurrection. They conclude with their Top 5 Stories of Redemption.

Returning to a literary career after a decade of exile, Fyodor Dostoevsky confronted one of the great delusions of secular humanism: that man is ultimately a rational being whose happiness depends on the exercise of self-interest. Characters in his novels The Idiot and Demons were designed to demonstrate that nihilistic self-destruction is the only outcome of such convictions. Father John concludes the episode by showing how nihilism played itself out in the fictional moral collapse of Dostoevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov and the real-life moral collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Il y a quelques jours, je parlais d’émergence d’un nouveau monde bipolaire. Le hasard des écrits faisant parfois bien les choses, depuis quelques jours est apparu dans notre vocabulaire, les Gilets Jaunes. Il ne se passe plus un jour, sans qu’on essaye...

Learn some of the amazing evidence of the eternal spiritual universe of the Bible, and why the physical world is a mere temporary illusion by comparison.

Researchers go to great lengths to prove a tiny bias in coin flipping

Li Jiayue, an exceptionally talented artist from China’s Sichuan province, specializes in intricate three-dimensional optical illusions that seem to disappear into their surroundings, captivating viewers with his ability to transform ordinary objects like lampposts, tree trunks, and even large buildings into extensions of their backgrounds. Although he initially pursued a major in electrical automation, his […]

How did stars form 7 billion years ago, or approximately halfway between the Big Bang and now? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices

How did stars form 7 billion years ago, or approximately halfway between the Big Bang and now? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices

How did stars form 7 billion years ago, or approximately halfway between the Big Bang and now? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices

Illusions of visual perception - a perceptual motion illusion.

A visual perception illusion by Edward H. Adelson.

You think you're informed, but here's why you might not be.

"Spectropia" demystified the techniques used by mediums who claimed they could speak to the dead, revealing the "absurd follies of Spiritualism"

Magicians' equipment supplier creates products that mystify even the most experienced illusionists

Whether space and time are part of the universe or they emerge from quantum entanglement is one of the biggest questions in physics. And we are getting close to the truth

The true nature of time has eluded physicists for centuries, but a new theoretical model suggests it may only exist due to entanglement between quantum objects

Whether space and time are part of the universe or they emerge from quantum entanglement is one of the biggest questions in physics. And we are getting close to the truth

"Everything we think is real is, in some way, an illusion." Former NASA illustrator Kurt Wenner makes incredible, brain-busting chalk illusions. His works start with diligent planning, beginning with pencil and paper. Kurt even prototypes by using an iPhone's camera to mimic human sight. He then maps these prototypes onto large street canvases where his ephemeral art can be enjoyed by the public. Director: Charlie Jordan Director of Photography: Malcolm Cook Editor: Joshua Pullar Talent: Kurt Wenner Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi Associate Producer: Melissa Cho Production Manager: Eric Martinez Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila Audio: Will Miller Cam Op/Gaffer: Dominik Czaczyk Production Assistant: Devin Beckwith Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen Assistant Editor: Diego Rentsch Special Thanks: Additional festival footage by Alessio Cuomo and Sander de Nooij. Filmed at the Sarasota Chalk Festival, courtesy of Denise Kowal. Special audio thanks to Dylan Bergeson.

Pascal Wallisch, NYU Professor of Psychology and Data Science, answers the internet's burning questions about illusions. What is motion-induced blindness? How do mirages happen? What's the explanation for "The Dress"? How did they make the Tupac hologram? Pascal answers all these questions and much more! For more on these illusions: https://www.foxlabnyu.com/techsupportreferences Director: Justin Wolfson Director of Photography: Brad Wickham Editor: Joshua Pullar Expert: Pascal Wallisch Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi Producer: Justin Wolfson Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas Production Manager: Eric Martinez Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila Camera Operator: Claudio Corredor Sound: Brett Van Deusen Production Assistant: Ralphy Vasquez Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen Assistant Editor: Paul Tael

Karnataka has achieved 10.2% GDP in 2023-24, higher to national average of 8.2%, says Udupi district in-charge minister

Asserting that “the ground realities are different”, AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami said “we will emerge victorious with the support of the people”

Are quotas the way to redress inequities? A majority of the members of the National Knowledge Commission did not agree, but the UPA government is pressing ahead with its focus on quotas. Two of the NKC's members, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Andre Beteille, have resigned from the commission.

Dasu Krishnamoorty cautions against equating the media with democracy itself.

The Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, has posed an enduring mystery. Why is it so hot? The Sun’s visible surface is only 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, […]

The post Sun’s loops are displaying an optical illusion appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Patt Morrison's outfit from her June 5, 2013 Patt's Hats entry. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

There are so many things  I like about this dress – the sleeve length, the boat neck, the fact that it’s navy and not black, and the fact that it wasn’t made in Bangladesh – but mostly it’s the gaily asymmetrical floral design that caught my eye.

The pattern is front and back, and I’m a stickler about those things. It looks like I have been loaded down with festive leis, but also loaded with one too many Mai Tais, so the flower garlands are askew as if I were listing a little bit.

There’s more of my current yellow shoe madness with these very Michelle Obama kitten-heel slingbacks in two different tones of yellow, one a more acid shade and the other more canary, or perhaps chrome yellow. That’s not to be confused with “Crome Yellow,” a very sardonic Aldous Huxley novel parodying the artsy intelligentsia set of 1920s England.

I hope you can see this bracelet. It’s a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry. The Victorians went way, way over the top on this stuff; some of it borders on the ghoulish, with lockets containing elaborately braided locks or even portraits or scenes made entirely from the hair of the deceased. I can admire the artistry but the sentiment can seem excessive. This piece, though, has a black and white enamel border around a tiny fly. Why a fly, I wondered. Then I read the inscription inside:

“From JR to AHR [clearly a husband to a wife] in loving memory of our darling little May Queen, died 7th August 1880, age 14 Mos.”

That inscription made the fly make sense. It’s a mayfly, a creature that lives a few days, or even just a few minutes, and here was this little girl, born in May – hence the May Queen reference to the mythical springtime queen of antiquity -- and died barely a year thereafter. So sweet, so sad, so human, all from an inscription on a bracelet. The girl’s parents are long dead, and so too are any siblings she may have had, but it can touch us more than 130 years later.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

New study sheds light on the illusion and athleticism behind Michael Jackson's 'Smooth Criminal' tilt.

A new study reveals how smooth, vertical surfaces can confuse a bat's echolocation abilities.

Experts of Paleolithic art in France say some cave drawings have a reoccurring theme.

If you haven't had the chance to listen to Heiðrik's award-winning 2016 album Funeral, we strongly suggest a listen to the record which details his experience of growing up as an LGBT youth in the Faroe Islands. Emotionally charged and beautifully delivered, it unsurprisingly saw the talented young man draw comparisons to Rufus Wainwright and Antony & The Johnsons. Having spent the last four years touring the record, building his reputation even further, the pressure is on for his long-awaited new record, Illusions.

Roy Horn, one half of the longtime Las Vegas illusionist duo Siegfried & Roy, has died at the age of 75 after suffering complications from coronavirus.

8 January 2020 , Volume 96, Number 1

8 January 2020 , Volume 96, Number 1

(Purdue University) Researchers at Purdue University have discovered that male treefrogs reduce their attractiveness to predators and parasites by overlapping their mating calls with their neighbors.

The simultaneous mating calls of the male pug-nosed tree frog confuses bats but not female frogs

Most of us are convinced that we're coherent individuals who are continuous in time. There's just one problem with this sense of self – it can’t exist

Wael Salem, Benjamin Cellini, Mark A. Frye, and Jean-Michel Mongeau

Most animals shift gaze by a ‘fixate and saccade’ strategy, where the fixation phase stabilizes background motion. A logical prerequisite for robust detection and tracking of moving foreground objects, therefore, is to suppress the perception of background motion. In a virtual reality magnetic tether system enabling free yaw movement, Drosophila implemented a fixate and saccade strategy in the presence of a static panorama. When the spatial wavelength of a vertical grating was below the Nyquist wavelength of the compound eyes, flies drifted continuously­ and gaze could not be maintained at a single location. Because the drift occurs from a motionless stimulus—thus any perceived motion stimuli are generated by the fly itself—it is illusory, driven by perceptual aliasing. Notably, the drift speed was significantly faster than under a uniform panorama suggesting perceptual enhancement due to aliasing. Under the same visual conditions in a rigid tether paradigm, wing steering responses to the unresolvable static panorama were not distinguishable from a resolvable static pattern, suggesting visual aliasing is induced by ego motion. We hypothesized that obstructing the control of gaze fixation also disrupts detection and tracking of objects. Using the illusory motion stimulus, we show that magnetically tethered Drosophila track objects robustly in flight even when gaze is not fixated as flies continuously drift. Taken together, our study provides further support for parallel visual motion processing and reveals the critical influence of body motion on visuomotor processing. Motion illusions can reveal important shared principles of information processing across taxa.

The book appeared in an adorable new video of the Duchess of Sussex reading to baby Archie on his first birthday

Roy Horn, the dark-haired half of Siegfried & Roy, raised the white tigers and other animals in the duo's extravagant shows that were one of the biggest draws on the Las Vegas Strip.

Blank city walls are huge canvases for this artist transforming our perception of ordinary buildings.