Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have peered deep into the eye of the chicken and found a masterpiece of biological design.

Scientists mapped five types of light receptors in the chicken's eye. They discovered the receptors were laid out in interwoven mosaics that maximized the chicken's ability to see many colors in any given part of the retina, the light-sensing structure at the back of the eye.

All five cone types are interwoven together in the chicken retina so that all cone types are present throughout the retina, but two cones of the same type are never directly next to each other. (Credit: Joseph Corbo/Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis)

You know, the computer screen just doesn't do any of this work justice, but that's certainly not going to stop me from gushing. And this year there's a number of innovative twists on this old-timey medium which always makes for compelling work. So, here you are, best of the best (at least from my seat) printed pieces of 2010.

This poster is most memorable for it's darling childish hand and classic message. A father & son collaboration, by Studio on Fire and Koen (age 6), the doodles were assembled digitally and letterpressed 14x20" with yellow and gold ink. $30 for sale here.

Silencing is a new illusion that shows it's hard to notice when moving objects change.

Cambridge, MA – Scientists at Harvard have found that people are remarkably bad at noticing when moving objects change in brightness, color, size, or shape. In a paper published in Current Biology, the researchers present a new visual illusion that "causes objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static," and that "demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance." The results have implications for everything from video game design to the training of pilots. Several videos demonstrating this striking effect can be found here.

SILENCING demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance. Simply by changing the retinotopic coordinates—moving the object or the eyes—it is possible to silence awareness of visual change, causing objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.

Color Changes

Instructions: Play the movie while looking at the small white speck in the center of the ring. At first, the ring is motionless and it's easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. But in reality they are changing the entire time. Take a look.

Photographs of cocktails through the microscope... Mixing up our perspective on our favorite cocktails, the photomicrography work of Michael Davidson shows different types of liquor and mixed drinks magnified over 1,000 times. His work has found a place in the "bar art" world selling prints through the company BevShots, and thanks to @spigumus and this Daily Mail article we find some interesting color compositions.

BevShot images are made by first crystallizing the drink of choice on a lab slide. Using a standard light microscope with a camera attached, the light source is polarized and passed through the crystal. This creates the colors we see featured.

Brought up here in the COLOURlovers forum, the PersonalDNA site allows you to decode your personality into a color palette. Who wants to make buttons? If we were to all wear our personal color codes just think how quickly we could recognize like minded people. Or maybe some things are better left personal.

PersonalDNA is "an innovative new personality test that combines thorough scientific analysis with novel questions and response techniques. The result is a fun test that provides accurate, detailed feedback. Are you an "attentive thinker"? A "free-wheeling artist"? Find out which one of our 256 personality types matches you, and get details that go beyond those categories, plus suggestions on how to be different—no two results are alike. Then compare your results to your friends' personalities, and see how well you know each other with our psych you/psych me feature."

Find out your color DNA. Are you a____?

(hover over any color to reveal the name)

Generous Thinker

Generous Thinker

Reserved Inventor

Considerate Idealist

Color perception drifts away from neutrality during wakefulness and is restored during sleep, suggests a research abstract presented in at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

Results indicate that prior wakefulness caused the color gray to be classified as having a slightly but significantly greenish tint. Overnight sleep restored perception to achromatic equilibrium so that gray was perceived as gray. According to the authors, scientists had not previously investigated how sleep might affect the way we view the world around us.

By sofia cordova vega

"This is among the first studies to investigate the effects of sleep on perception," said principal investigator and lead author Bhavin Sheth, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston in Texas. "Our findings suggest that wakefulness causes color classification to drift away from neutrality, and sleep restores color classification to neutral."

Prior wakefulness caused the color gray to be classified as having a slightly but significantly greenish tint. Overnight sleep restored perception to achromatic equilibrium so that gray was perceived as gray.

White Fungus is an experimental arts magazine based in Taichung City, Taiwan. Featuring writing on art, music, history and politics, plus original artworks, poetry, fiction and comics, White Fungus is an ongoing experiment in community media art. As the spores have been released its creators look forward to seeing which way the wind blows. The only thing more uncertain than its future is its past.

白木耳雜誌 是一本發源於台中的當代前衛藝術雜誌， 內容詳細介紹了關於來自世界各地的前衛音樂 、歷史、 政治、 原創作品、 詩、 短篇小說 與漫畫。白木耳雜誌本身既是一個社群媒體藝術的實驗過程。當這些實驗性的孢子逐漸成熟而散落，雜誌創刊者十分期待風會將這些孢子傳遞至何方，但關於未來，一切則充滿了新的生機與各種可能性。

ITSOKCOLORWAY from Multi Polar on Vimeo.

For Matthew Hoffman it's all about identity. On the casual outward glance he's a 9-5er, a career oriented young chap, probably unknown to some as...shhhh....an artist. But over wayside he runs Multi-Polar Projects, a rep house for artists Sighn, H. Mathis, Ervin Orion and Mateo. An art collective of four dudes pursing their own separate works. Which is bad-ass alone, yet is ostensibly all very straight-forward, until you learn the entire Multi-Polar Projects crew is just a single person. Hoffman. Which then begs the question, where is the artist and where is the person? And also how? And...When does the sleeping happen?

It's not really a question that needs answering, it's a delightful enough proposition on its own. It's seems to be merely the only way Hoffman knows how to be an artist. It's ingrained in his process and can't be teased out.

Better still? He's dropping a new project after a year-long art-making hiatus.

What ensued was an extensive back-and-forth between myself, Sighn, H. Mathis, and Multi-Polar Projects. Hilarious because Hoffman's playing all the parts from separate addresses.

Sighn's the moniker responsible, working in his typical text-only emotive style. ITSOKCOLORWAY is the rainbow-hued edition of his ongoing ITSOKAY Project. As the Tweeps and Facespaces erupt with millions of electronic blurbs per day and viral campaign after campaign goes zipping into internet obscurity, he's busy carving pithy witticisms out of wood with a life-long goal of 1 million wooden ITSOKs. It's a permanent snap-shot of communication, forged from materials that once grew in the earth. Part sculpture, part talisman, all parts delicious typography and wordplay, you'd have to be a cyborg not to have feeeeeeelings when taking in the work.

I shot Sighn a request to answer some light-hearted interview questions, and what ensued was an extensive back-and-forth between myself, Sighn, H. Mathis, and Multi-Polar Projects. Hilarious because Hoffman's playing all the parts from separate addresses, poking fun at himself the entire time. In the end it ended up as a snarky not-so-subtle, and entirely unintentional, jab at long annoying email chains. Oh my stars and garters kids, this email at its most artistic (and meta) indeed... For this designer, blogger and typography geek, that's the black hole of perfect.

So here you go: H. Mathis' illustrated responses to Sighn's interview questions. By Matthew Hoffman. I think.

1. Doodle a story that your son told you:

2. Make us a Venn Diagram:

3. Draw a fuck-up that you ended up liking and used in your work:

4. What is it exactly that's on the inside?

5. Draw your process:

6. A love letter to your favorite snack:

I guess this is what I call reinventing being an artist. Old schooling the new school. And there's no tells just how far this kid can go. It's mayhem! Mania! It's going to rule, bro. Someone please save me from myself, before there's ecstatic-induced vomiting like that kid in Adam Sandler's Big Daddy.

Learn more and order your own piece here. ITSOKs come in 10 colors, plus natural unfinished bamboo or basswood. $20 each.

NASA's mobile robots Spirit & Opportunity have been exploring Mars for six years now, 25 times longer than predicted. Due to the extended life of the robots the photographic team, headed by Jim Bell, has had more time to capture the Martian landscapes with lighting, framing, color, depth of focus in mind. To date, the robots have sent back over 250,000 photos. Some of which have been selected for Jim Bell's recent book Postcards From Mars, which contains over 150 full-color-process prints.

If you're looking for a gift to give a color lover this holiday season consider one of these classic color books. This is not an exhaustive list (if you have some favorite titles share them in the comments), but we think these are some great suggestions, each packed with valuable information and inspiration.

Interaction of Color

By Josef Albers

Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.

The latest edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.