Month: July 2014

NPR has a wonderful story of childhood friends, Henry Wanyoike and Joseph Kibunja who started running together as children 30 years ago and are still running in competition today.  That is a remarkable story enough, but even more compelling is that Wanyoike is blind from a stroke that cost him his sight and Kibunja is …

Continue reading “Blind Kenyan Runner Has Far-Reaching Vision”

I’ve talked about jumping spiders before here as they are an amazing animal with very well developed vision.  However, their retinas and visual pathways are very different from the vertebrate retinas in that they use image defocusing for depth perception rather than parallax like humans and other vertebrates do.  Figuring out spider vision has been a …

Continue reading “Moving Jumping Spider Retinas”

There is a short but fun post over on Knowing Neurons that looks to be part of a series on color and how color is perceived.  Its got some great visuals by the guest author Raz and I can’t wait to see what she has to say about oppositional antagonism.

Benham’s Top or Benham’s disk is named after Charles Benham, a toy maker but also an amateur scientist who contributed and published articles to the likes of Nature.  Benham’s observation with a toy top was relayed through an article in Nature in 1894 that described a visual phenomenon generated by a toy top painted like …

Continue reading “Benham’s Top Illusion”