Apparently, after thinking long and hard, the mouthpiece for China’s Communist Party was cocksure that the erection of a new headquarters would be warmly received — but they blew it.

Out of the ten finalist competitors, the Best Illusion of the Year title went to “Rotation Generated by Translation”, an illusion developed by a team of mathematicians and illusion creators from Meiji University in Japan.

Think that your eyes are bigger than your stomach? Well, actually, yes… they are.

The 9th annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest took place today, Monday May 13th, in the Naples Philharmonic Hall in Florida.

The Danish chef’s portrait features some of the signature dishes offered by Redzepi’s restaurant Noma — the best restaurant in the world.

Yesterday we wrote about the memory palace of Tom Meseroll, the Master of Martial Magic, so it is fitting that this week’s Neuroscience in Fiction pick features a fictional memory palace: the mansion of reminiscence at the center of Hannibal Lecter’s brilliantly twisted mind.

(Ed. note:   This post previously appeared on our Sleights of Mind Blog) Change blindness, our failure to detect changes in a scene that should have been (but weren’t) obvious, is a common occurrence not only on the magic stage, but it in real life, too. The San Francisco Exploratorium has now produced a spectacular [...]

Male bowerbirds are virtuoso architects. To woo females they construct an intricate structure (a bower) from twigs that they meticulously decorate with a variety of found objects. The result is the ultimate avian bachelor pad. Biologists have long marveled at the male bowerbirds’ elaborate courtship scheme. Now new findings add to a growing body of [...]

“Big” me. “Little” me. Watch these two versions of me–which are really the same size–explain why I appear petite in one place on screen and large in another. The reason, in short, is that I have been trapped in a clever visual illusion, one invented 78 years ago by American opthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. In [...]

A few years ago, James Gurney, a celebrated artist and author, stood before his easel to paint a deli in Poughkeepsie. Surveying the scene before him, he was immediately overwhelmed with literally millions of details. People strolled by. Insects fluttered overhead. Signs poked out from the store and up from the street. Every tree had [...]