Physicists and vision scientists are lining up behind a provocative claim: the rich color we call purple is not a property of light at all, but a story the brain tells itself. Light in the real world ...

Think about the colors of the world around you—the blue of a cloudless sky, the green of a new leaf, the blazing red of a tulip’s petals. We see these colors because of the way our eyes work. But what ...

Human eyes don’t register the infrared portion of the light spectrum because infrared photons don’t carry enough energy to trigger the signaling pathway inside our light-sensing cells. But we’ve been ...

A new shape-shifting material can change both its texture and color in seconds, inspired by the camouflage abilities of octopuses. By precisely controlling how a polymer swells with water, researchers ...