If you have been puzzled by Mona Lisa's smile – how she's radiant one moment and serious the next instant – then your worries are over. It happens because our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain about her smile.
Different cells in the retina transmit different categories of information or "channels" to the brain. These channels encode data about an object's size, clarity, brightness and location in the visual field.
"Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you don't see the smile," says Luis Martinez Otero, a neuroscientist at Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, who conducted the study along with Diego Alonso Pablos.
The Phuket Vegetarian Festival kicked off on the weekend with local residents of Chinese ancestry giving up meat for 10 days. Oh, and sticking all sorts of things through their cheeks.
These illustrations are genius - and all for a good cause!
Save The Balls! is a project created by illustrator Patrick Bundeli out of his determination to quit smoking. Each ball representing one instance in which he had the urge to pick up a cigarette, and this developed into a project of saving those overly abused ping pong balls which endure beats of up to 170km/h!
To find out more about the project go to the Behance Network
An extremely funny site has just opened and will, I'm sure, become a smash hit for pet owners and generally curious onlookers for 2009....Please welcome www.upsidedowndogs.com !!! WTF?!!
This robot has serious identity issues! Phenomenal engineering and robotics makes the WD-2 a very advanced machine, capable of morphing it's facial features within a matter of seconds to recreate the face of someone else!
And as if that wasn't freaky enough...you can even project your face onto the mask...check the dudes out in the video...that's an image projected onto the robots face....which has morphed into the same shape as yours!
This is normally when I go off on some spiel about the Matrix and the future...but this is very much in the present day! Though it's hard to see a practical use of this feature in the commercial sense, I can see it's use for more sinister applications with ease(Hitman Codename 47 anyone?)....but I don't want to reveal them in case I end up like John Connor in the Terminator triggering some outrageous set of events leading to the destruction of the human race by the very machines created to make life a little easier..not to throw it away and complicate things like I just have in this ridiculously long paragraph!