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Magic tricks can draw on dexterity, science, technique or even psychology. Here, we offer you the chance to travel back in time, to the beginning of the 20th century, and to reveal to you a few tricks of the period.

What scientific thinkers and achievements have led to vast improvements in optics over the centuries? Discover the fascinating ways that our understanding of light informs the world in which we live.

Many people anticipating the creation of an invisibility cloak might be surprised to learn that a group of American researchers has created 25,000 individual cloaks.

Here's a rare look at a rainbow over the skies of Ethiopia. Find out how this cloud — known as a "pileus cloud" — brightens the atmosphere.

Optics and photonics technical articles, news, videos, product and industry updates, from SPIE Newsroom.

By devising a way to cool and control light at the same time, a "gas" of photons was made to form the ultracold, high-density quantum state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

"T-rays" may make X-rays obsolete as a means of detecting bombs on terrorists or illegal drugs on traffickers, among other uses, contends a physicist who is helping lay the theoretical groundwork to make the concept a reality.

Very often in science, the unexpected discovery turns out to be the most significant. Researchers weren't looking for a breakthrough in the transmission of terahertz signals, but there it was.