The Microcanyon was taken with a microscope from FEI's Nova DualBeam Family, unlike the other two which were taken with microscopes from the Quanta family. The Quanta microscope was also used to take this image of a hydrothermal worm that rocked the internet.

This year's winner, however, was taken at an extremely high magnification, with a width of just 67µm, making it more than what it seems. In reality it's a micro-crack in a piece of steel, taken after multiple bending tests.

The page images in the PDF files are of excellent quality, but you may find they are too large to view using your web browser. We suggest you download them (e.g. right click and "save as") and then view them on your computer. The smaller DjVu version may be more convenient: download the zip archive, extract it to a folder, and then open the file "directory.djvu" using a DjVu viewer.

The optical character recognition (OCR) in the DjVu and PDF files are useful for searching. Alas, the OCR is not of high quality and you may not find all instances of your target word(s). We would be delighted should you see fit to make and share a cleaner copy of the text.

Volume III begins with a discussion of perceptual inference. This is where most students of perception will want to start.

Happy reading!

Some blind people are able to use the sound of echoes to "see" where things are and to navigate their environment. Now, a new study finds that these people may even be using visual parts of their brains to process the sounds.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110525/sc_livescience/blindpeopleseeshapesnavigateusingechoes

(Thanks to Melissa for sending)

This person is either David Hubel or Torsten Wiesel and has an anesthetized cat with it's eyes pointed toward this screen. An electrode is placed in the occipital cortex in the first part of the neocortex that receives visual information from the eyes via the thalamus. This electrode picks up the electrical signal of an action potential, which signifies the information that a particular neuron in this area is passing on to other neurons.

Here are more cool videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPQAtkxn3tY&feature=related

"You'd be able to literally see all around you, including behind yourself, and zooming in at will, creating a "stereoscopic/binocular system, simultaneously providing 10x zoom to both eyes." And you would do this all hands-free, apparently by barking out or pre-programming a command (the solicitation leaves it up to a designer's imagination) to adjust focus."

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/pentagon-wants-to-give-troops-terminator-vision/

Most people assume that what you see is pretty much what your eye sees and reports to your brain. In fact, your brain adds very substantially to the report it gets from your eye, so that a lot of what you see is actually "made up" by the brain (see Seeing more than your eye does).

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/latinhib.html

Most people (even many who work on the brain) assume that what you see is pretty much what your eye sees and reports to your brain. In fact, your brain adds very substantially to the report it gets from your eye, so that a lot of what you see is actually "made up" by the brain.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot1.html

Also see : http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot/

for an Applet that allows you to map you blind spot.

http://www.art-dept.com/artists/rankin/portfolio/specialprojects/eyescapes/portfolio.html