The summer curiosity box is here!
Featuring new innovative, thought-provoking objects of wonder
Featuring:
The Bezold-Stroop shirT
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Why put only one optical perception illusion on a shirt, when you can put two? A wearable illusion combo of the Bezold and Stroop effects—this shirt tricks your brain in two very different ways.
The Bezold Effect makes you think the letters in each word are different colors. Spoiler alert: they’re not. Your brain just gets a little too clever for its own good.
Here you can see what the shirt illustration looks like with and without the Bezold-inducing color lines: without them, it’s very clear that the letters for the three words are all the same color.
The effect, and other chromatic assimilation effects, works because perception is extremely contextual: your brain doesn’t just process every item in your visual field individually, it processes them in relation to each other, to build a more coherent view of your surroundings.
The Stroop Effect is in play when you read aloud the color of each word—not what the words say—and it takes your brain an extra moment to process it; so if —like when the word "red" is written in blue. The most common way to experience it is to have somebody read the color of a word out loud, when the color is mismatched to the word, called an incongruent stimuli.
The Stroop effect was (at least according to psychological literature) used by the CIA to trap spies! Supposedly, passing a cyrillic (Russian) text Stroop test was easier for non-native Russian speakers; if you grew up speaking Russian, the test was more difficult. So if the counterspies printed the word красный (red) in blue, and the suspected spy said blue with a long Stroop lag—they knew they had a native speaker on their hands, possibly a spy. Interestingly, a number of experiments have shown this to be true: the Stroop interval (delay in naming time) is bigger in people’s native language than in languages they learned later in life; and this holds true not just in English but other languages as well.
This shirt probably won’t help you track down spies, but it is an excellent example of two of the most fascinating psychovisual effects around; and a groovy retro fashion statement, to boot.
HISTORY OF THE EARTH HELICAL JIGSAW PUZZLE——————->
The helix is one of the most important shapes in biology, as the structure of an incredible number of the fundamental proteins and nucleic acids that make life on Earth function—including your DNA. And the Curiosity Box is proud to present the History of the Earth Helical Jigsaw Puzzle, the world's first helicoid puzzle, featuring 535 custom-cut pieces that spiral upward in a stunning helix. As you build, you’ll physically trace the evolutionary journey from single-celled organisms to complex life as we know it.
Helixes are geometric shapes that are a subset of spirals; while most spirals have a constantly changing radius, helixes have a mostly constant radius, and helicoids are created by a flat surface that is rotated and moved along an axis. Topologically, they are “minimal surfaces,” like a plane, meaning that they have the smallest possible surface area between their boundaries.* The geometric properties are one of the reasons they’re so commonly found in nature; a helix is an extremely effective shape to bunch up very long molecules like DNA in a confined space (like a cell). It’s so efficient that DNA is actually a superhelix: a series of helixes that are coiled into other helixes.
We carefully selected each of the creatures that appear on this scale. Some just because we love them (hello, okapi!), others because they mark significant firsts in the evolution of life on Earth: the first flower, the first animal that had a face, the first creature that laid an egg.
Gazing at the scale, it can be fascinating to see the changes in species’ appearances over time, and as a graphic reminder of the relationships between species: that we are closer in time to a tyrannosaur than the tyrannosaur was to a diplodocus.
Challenge your mind, decorate your space, and relive life’s epic story, one spiral at a time.
SLIDE RULE CHOPSTICKS
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How many things in your household can be used both for sustenance and math? At the very least, these incredible—and exceedingly useful—slide rule chopsticks. Etched directly onto the surface are reference scales that let you perform multiplication, division, square roots, cube roots, cubes, and squares
A study in the scientific journal Applied Ergonomics found 240 mm to be the optimum length for food pinching with chopsticks, so we made them exactly that long. The optimum diameter was found to be 6 mm, so we made sure to go with that, too
A study in the scientific journal Applied Ergonomics found 240 mm to be the optimum length for food pinching with chopsticks, so we made them exactly that long. The optimum diameter was found to be 6 mm, so we made sure to go with that, too
Sushi and science have never been this well-paired. Whether you’re looking for on-the-go math calculations or an optimized eating experience, the slide rule chopsticks are ready!
PUZZLE ME TWICE
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From renowned math writer and The Guardian columnist Alex Bellos comes Puzzle Me Twice—a mind-bending collection of brainteasers, logic challenges, and numerical riddles designed to stretch the limits of your reasoning.
This Curiosity Box exclusive edition isn’t just packed with mathematical mischief. It also features a never-before-seen Q&A between Alex Bellos and Vsauce’s own Michael Stevens, diving into the curious world of puzzles, problem-solving, and the joy of thinking differently.
Whether you’re a seasoned puzzle master or just puzzle-curious, this book will twist your neurons into knots—in the best way possible.
Prism
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In 2002, philosopher Robert Crease polled hundreds of scientists about what they thought were the most beautiful experiments in the history of science. From that, he created a list of the top ten: and one of them was Isaac Newton’s use of a prism to break sunlight into the spectrum. So we felt dutybound to provide our subscribers with a sciene tool everybody knows about, but few people seem to actually have - a top-quality prism made of of K9 optical borosilicate glass, a leaded crystal glass with a high refractive index and excellent clarity.
What Newton had witnessed was the basic optical phenomenon that causes a prism to show the spectrum: refraction, the bending of light when it enters a new medium. Light changes direction because it changes speed, and the more a particular color wavelength slows down, the more it bends.
Lower wavelengths on the blue end of the spectrum slow down and bend more than higher wavelengths on the red end, and
that causes dispersion, which we see as the splitting of light into the spectrum.
Interestingly, glass isn’t the only thing you can make a prism out off, and some of the most famous experiments in science have used prisms made from weirder and unexpected materials, like asphalt, the same stuff
used to pave roads. Glass prisms work great for visible light, because the
wavelengths pass through and refract fairly easily. But visible light is just
one sliver of the broader electromagnetic spectrum that stretches from radio waves to gamma rays. So no surprise, for other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, you need prisms made from different things. Prism made from salt refract infrared light, and ones made from asphalt refract radio waves (which is how Heinrich Hertz proved radio wave were part of the same electromagnetic spectrum as visible light).
You can’t see all those other spectrums, of course, but you can enjoy the beautiful rainbow spectrum produced by your new prism. And a bonus, we’ve included on the Curiosity Box and in the included magazine a few of our new “spectrum ciphers” - words with letters made from different colors that seema jumble when seen with a naked eye, but when viewed through a prism, are reassembled back into a readable state. Here’s one to try out!
