Optics

The iconic "school bus yellow" was the invention of an educator named Frank Cyr. But if yellow is so good for visibility, why don't all fire trucks use it too?

By Dave Roos

Scientists created this expanding black hole illusion to show how your mind can trick your eye.

By Kathryn Whitbourne

Your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. Those mountains way off in the distance really do look blue, and it's because of how light wavelengths scatter in the atmosphere.

By Mark Mancini

We all have favorite colors. But have you ever considered why you like one color more than another?

By Allison Troutner

Vantablack is one of the darkest substances known, able to absorb up to 99.965 percent of visible light. But is it the blackest of blacks on the planet?

By Cherise Threewitt

Primary colors are the blocks from which all other colors are built. But there's a lot more to know about them than the basic red, yellow and blue we learned about in kindergarten.

By Michelle Konstantinovsky

Modern color theory got its start with, believe it or not, Sir Isaac Newton, who also discovered a little thing called gravity and invented calculus.

By Jesslyn Shields

Is it its own special type of particle? A wave that's flowing through another medium? Or is there some creepy, unknown substance surrounding us that we simply don't perceive or understand?

By Nathan Chandler

Why do we love looking at a perfectly stacked display of soup cans or six flower petals around a stamen? Our brains seem wired for it -- but why?

By Dave Roos

If you're one of those people who chooses invisibility as your desired superpower, it could mean you have a dark side.

By Alia Hoyt

Helicopters, ceiling fans, even tricked-out car tire rims: Sometimes they can even look like they're going backward, or bending.

By Laurie L. Dove

A wall of Lego-like bricks creates the illusion of hyper-vivid, three-dimensional audio, altering sound waves much like a hologram does visible light.

By Patrick J. Kiger

It's a young lady! It's an old woman! It's a blue dress! No, it's gold! Why are we fooled by optical illusions and what do they tell us about how the brain works?

By Meisa Salaita

Whereas the majority of sighted people see a world with just a million colors, or fewer if you're color-blind.

By Kate Kershner

It’s true: In 6 easy steps, you too can draw an impossible shape.

Cosmological redshift: sounds like the latest blockbuster coming to a theater near you, doesn't it? In reality, it has to do with how light itself travels -- and understanding how it works is essential to advanced space telescope technology.

By Kate Kershner

What if there are colors within the visible spectrum that our brains can't perceive? In fact, there are. They're called impossible colors. But some researchers think they've discovered a way to see the impossible.

By Dave Roos

Light travels pretty rapidly, but when it comes to faraway galaxies, that light takes a while to reach our telescopes. In fact, the light you see might actually be from billions of years ago.

By Kate Kershner

Seven ounces a ray! No, that's a lie. Measuring the weight of light is not as straightforward as that. So what's the more complicated explanation?

By Kate Kershner

When speed is everything and light marks the universe's speed limit, lasers are bound to be the answer. At least, that's what NASA and a bunch of Wall Street types are betting on.

By Nicholas Gerbis

Kaleidoscopes have been fascinating people since the early 19th century. Whether you think of kaleidoscopes as toys or as works of art, no matter how often you look inside, you'll never see the same thing twice.

By Melanie F. F. Gibbs

All colors that you see fall into the visible light spectrum. Learn about the colors in the visible light spectrum in this article.

By HowStuffWorks.com Contributors

Unlike the cheap microscopes you peered into in school, these advanced instruments can breathe rich detail into the tiny world around us, including the world of nanotechnology.

By Jonathan Atteberry

A venerable work of art hangs lifeless in a museum, the once brilliant scene dulled by centuries of dirt and grime. Can laser analysis and modern art restoration techniques save the masterpiece?

By William Harris

The Diamond synchrotron is a massive facility that houses a beam of light 10 billion times brighter than the sun. But is that all it does?

By Jacob Silverman