Have you ever noticed that signposts and trees on the side of the road seem to whoosh by faster right as you drive past them, or that a door frame seems to curve outward as you approach it? These are just two examples of real-life movements that underlie more than 50 types of illusions, now systematically organized and explained by scientists at the California Institute of Technology. The systematization also lends a glimpse into how illusions are not simply tricks your brain likes to play on you; they are manifestations of how the visual system evolved to keep up with real-life motion. These illusions now fall into 28 predictable categories defined by Mark Changizi during a fellowship in the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech and appearing May 28 in the journal Cognitive Science. More...

After completing a worldwide survey unprecedented in rigor and detail of astronomical sites for the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), the TMT Observatory Corporation board of directors has selected two outstanding sites, one in each hemisphere, for further consideration. Cerro Armazones lies in Chile's Atacama Desert, and Mauna Kea is on Hawai'i Island. The TMT observatory, which will be capable of peering back in space and time to the era when the first stars and galaxies were forming and will be able to directly image planets orbiting other stars, will herald a new generation of telescopes. More...

Studies of the brains of blind persons whose sight was partially restored later in life have produced a compelling example of the brain's ability to adapt to new circumstances and rewire and reconfigure itself. The research, conducted by Caltech postdoctoral researcher Melissa Saenz and Christof Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems, shows that the part of the brain that processes visual information in normal individuals can be co-opted to respond to both visual and auditory information. That brain reorganization persists even if the blind subjects later regain their vision—for example, through technologies such as corneal stem-cell transplants, retinal prosthetics, and gene therapy. More...