In comics, Clark Kent looks a lot like Superman, so similar every child has to wonder why no one puts it together. A pair of glasses on Kent, and a small lock of hair on Superman's forehead, are the only differences.

Yet that's probably enough, according to a new paper. Small alterations to
a person's appearance, such as wearing glasses, can significantly hinder positive facial identification.

Octopuses, squid and other cephalopods are colorblind - their eyes see only black and white - but their weirdly shaped pupils may allow them to detect color and mimic the colors of their background, according to a father/son team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University.

For decades, biologists have puzzled over the paradox that, despite their brilliantly colored skin and ability to rapidly change color to blend into the background, cephalopods have eyes containing only one type of light receptor, which basically means they see only black and white.

Nearly half of glaucoma patients don't take their daily prescription eye drops as prescribed, due to forgetfulness or physical limitations like arthritis. However, missing vital doses of glaucoma medication makes these patients vulnerable to increased vision loss and blindness.

A medicated silicone ring that rests on the surface of the eye reduced eye pressure in glaucoma patients by about 20 percent over six months, potentially benefiting 3 million people in the United States who have glaucoma. Phase 2 clinical trial results on this technology were published today and the results are also being presented today at the Ophthalmology Innovation Summit in New Orleans.  

A diet rich in vitamin C could cut risk of cataract progression by a third, suggests a study being published online today in Ophthalmology. The research is also the first to show that diet and lifestyle may play a greater role than genetics in cataract development and severity.

When you look at the rainbow, what you see is the prism like effect of the mist (aerosolized water droplets) in the air reflecting the sunlight from different portions of the spheres.  These water droplets when suspended in air as mist will all reflect different colors at different angles.  The angle between you, the mist and the sun, will then determine which color is being refracted back to you from each location resulting in a rainbow.  This color is itself a special form of radiation, more specifically it is non-ionizing radiation with very specific wavelengths.

Our vision and hearing aren't as reliable as we might think, according to a new study.

The scholars conducted the research in part because there had never been a comprehensive study to examine whether humans' 'spatial localization' ability -- that is, whether we can immediately and accurately perceive where an object is located -- is as well-honed as we believe it to be. In the study, subjects were asked to sit facing a black screen, behind which were five loudspeakers. Mounted on the ceiling above was a projector capable of flashing bursts of light onto the screen, at the same spots where the speakers were located.

Scholars have found that the causes of congenital face blindness can be traced back to an early stage in the perceptual process. 

It isn't obvious that sign language, gestures to replace hearing words, would have regional dialects - accents - but it is so, according to Jami Fisher, a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Linguistics, who is working on a project to document what they're calling the Philadelphia accent of this language.

What differentiates one region of American Sign Language from other such dialects? Why do those in the deaf community have an intuition that it's different? And how could scientists understand the regional variation?

When people are listening to music, their emotional reactions to the music are reflected in changes in their pupil size. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, are the first to show that both the emotional content of the music and the listeners' personal involvement with music influence pupil dilation. A new paper demonstrates that pupil size measurement can be effectively used to probe listeners' reactions to music.