[Ig Nobel Prize winner] John Senders led a series of safety experiments in which he drove an automobile on Route 128 — the major highway that circles Boston to the west — while a visor repeatedly flapped down over his face, blinding him…. —so begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.
Tag: Vision
Failure to detect color vision in a non-malingerer
If a person insists that they are color blind, how can you prove otherwise? This was the question facing Herbert Jägle, Bettina Sadowski, Jan Kremers, Hendrik P.N. Scholl, Beate Leo-Kottler, and Lindsay T. Sharpe, who set out to devise a method. Their 2003 study was carried out as a result of a court case, in […]
Improbable on Science Friday today: upside-down vision
I’m going to be on NPR’s Science Friday program today. We’ll talk about the series of experiments that forced people to see the world upside down, left-right reversed, and other unusual ways. This segment will be at the start of hour 2 of the program. Here’s film from that experiment:
I am an eye, if I am an urchin, says Sam
Biology continues to prove itself weird almost (but not quite) beyond imagining. A press release from the University of Gothenberg, Sweden, quotes scientist Sam Dupont [pictured here, with two eyes] as saying: “We argue that the entire adult sea urchin can act as a huge compound eye, and that the shadow that is cast by […]