Category: Sciences
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Anatomy of an illusion
All the details about a simple optical illusion and what we can learn from it about the inner workings of the human brain.
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The most agile robot on Earth
Usually, robots you see in real life are hardly able to move around or to behave… like a robot. This one is all the more impressive. It moves, it walks, it runs on four legs adapting itself to nearly any kind of rough terrain as well as a mule, a dog, or a man (on…
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Sudden drop of minke whale populations
A scientific study coming from Iceland suggest that in the recent years the minke whale population suddenly dropped from 45000 in 2001 to less than 15000 last year. This is a enormous change that is not yet explained for a small whale that was more or less protected by its smaller size (big whales bring…
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Diffraction and digital photography
Several times, I talked about the limitation to photo image quality by light diffraction but I failed to go into the details. To the general request of one reader who asked, I will try to give some explanations to better understand why the digital photographer must absolutely take that into account to make better pictures…
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Astronomical optical illusion
V838 Monoceroti Expansion (Hubble) It wasn’t anything interesting until it happened but the star V838 Monoceroti, which had simply sat in obscurity, flared up in 2002 to become 600,000 more luminous than our own Sun. It didn’t take long for the star to fade back into the darkness but the Hubble Space Telescope managed to…