The savings might be dramatic-roughly a quarter of all electric power is used for lighting, according to the U.S. Macknik suggests this discovery could lead to lights that save energy and last longer. Their findings suggest that if 67-millisecond pulses of light were alternated with 10-millisecond periods of darkness, people would nonetheless perceive these light pulses as one and not as flickering. Macknik and his colleagues discovered that perceptions of brightness were not only linked with the duration of light flashes, but also with their periodicity. For instance, Thomas Edison found that bulbs flickering 60 times a second appear to be constant light sources, says Macknik (who also serves on Scientific American MIND’s board of advisers). Researchers have analyzed the flickering of lightbulbs for as long as they have existed.
By creating a lightbulb that exploits this illusion, the researchers hope to create bulbs that save up to 20 percent on electricity bills. In 2012 cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Macknik, now at the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, and his colleagues discovered an illusion that allows a light to essentially flicker off for 13 percent of the time yet appear as bright to the human brain as if it was on the entire time. "You can reduce the amount of information in a signal and the brain fills in the gaps."Īfter removing sounds that people cannot generally hear and then using traditional compression methods that encode redundant information to save space, MP3s can reduce the size of a sound file by 90 percent or so. "Lossy audio compression absolutely involves an illusion," says perceptual and cognitive psychologist Diana Deutsch at the University of California, San Diego. For example, if two sounds are presented simultaneously very close together in time, then depending on their frequency and intensity, the brain may only perceive one of them, a phenomenon known as masking. How does MP3 compression work? It eliminates generally inaudible sounds. An MP3 is a product of “ lossy audio compression,” in which parts of the audio signal are discarded to shrink a sound file yet cause zero to minimal perceived loss in the sound quality for the average listener. Here are 10 practical applications that use or control illusions, from warships to virtual reality to Michelangelo's David and the Statue of Liberty.Īll MP3s are based on illusion. One internet fan joked: “What kinda party is this, and why wasn’t I invited?”Īnother said: “That genuinely confused me.Although illusions are by definition not real, scientists are increasingly finding ways to use them to make an impact on the real world. Since being uploaded to photo-sharing site Imgur, it racked up over 81,000 views.īut not everyone caught on to the visual trickery. The unlucky lady is just the victim of poor-timing as her tattooed pal reached out his arm at the exact wrong moment so the crease of his elbow appears to be her naked butt crack. *** No knickers? Photo fail exposes bikini babe in hilarious way *** But it’s actually much more innocent than it seems. It looks like the stunning lady has been caught short without any bikini bottoms on.
In the background a brunette beauty happily looks on at her mates splashing in the water, completely unaware of what’s going on. Recently a bikini babe’s unfortunate holiday snap went viral for all the wrong reasons. BAD TIMING: The bikini babe became the butt of the joke (Image: IMGUR)īut she’s not the first person to get snapped in a compromising position.
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