When people look into a mirror, they see an image of themselves behind the glass. That image results from light rays encountering the shiny surface and bouncing back, or reflecting, providing a ...

Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction. The discovery has led ...

Ever wonder how a mirror works? If you want to find the path that light takes when reflecting off a surface, you could use Fermat's Principle. This states something like this: The path that light ...

During the REM sleep state (believed to be linked to dreaming), neurons in our visual cortex fire, as if we really see something. Such activity is thought to generate what we see in dreams, but do we ...

Amid the thousands of treasures in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s East Asian art collection, a small bronze mirror dating back to the 15th or 16th century always seemed rather unremarkable. Last ...