A Taiwan-based company has built a transparent smartphone with a multi-touch display from a light piece of glass. Although it's still a prototype, the executives have mentioned the transparent smartphone could arrive in late 2013.

Your brain is trying to do two things at once. Look at the image and try to say the colour of the word you see, rather than the actual word itself. It’s very tricky to do. The words seem to wrestle in a bizarre power struggle with the colours. This is because the right side of your brain is seeing the colour of the word while the left side is trying to say the word itself.

You see those embedded spirals of green, pink and blue? The green and blue spirals are actually the exact same colour.

When the green and pink colours are placed side-by-side, they enhance each other’s darker tones, making them look like completely new colours. How we perceive colours is dependant on the light and shadow surrounding them and on the placing of contrasting colours side by side.

In the catacombs of Sicily, there's a creepy child mummy named Rosalia Lombardo who appears to open and close her eyes on a regular basis. Here's how a scientist solved the mystery of this little "sleeping beauty". (Hint: she's not actually undead.)

Can you spot the cat amongst the pigeons? This is Hungarian artist's - Dudolf - latest optical illusion that has some several viewers puzzled. The cause of all this difficulty is likely to have something to do with the way in which the brain processes visual information, by identifying repeating patterns and then using this to automatically fill in the gaps in peripheral vision. This makes it very difficult to spot minor details or irregularities in our visual field without focusing directly on these elements, which means you probably won't see the cat unless you stare straight at it.
...

Despite his mother beckoning him to come towards her, this infant hesitates to cross the "visual cliff" – an apparently steep drop that is actually covered by transparent glass. Psychologists in the 1960s found that most infants 6 to 14 months of age were reluctant to crawl over the cliff, suggesting they had the ability to perceive depth. Most psychologists believe that the ability to perceive depth is partly innate and partly a product of early visual experience.

Here's a test you can try to demonstrate how your perception of depth is still live and active. Below are two perfect circles, yet the smaller circle appears distorted. Our brain interprets the converging lines to be adding depth to the screen, as if the solid middle is further aw ...