Once released from an arbitrary height, the top of the Slinky will approach the ground at what appears to be 1 g acceleration but the bottom will appear to levitate, stirring only once the top of the device meets its centre of gravity.
Describes Color constancy, wherein the human brain can compensate for a missing color in three-color combination systems.
[[Named for Wunibald Kamm; while a three-dimensional object in nature seeks a tear-shape in response to aerodynamic pressure, the Baron Reinhard Koenig-Fachsenfeld discovered that truncation of its tapered tail would leave the remainder of the form with its aerodynamic efficiency largely intact.
Physicists call it entrainment.
An optical lens of diameter d laterally deconstructed into concentric rings of uniform height h will fit (but not fill) the volume of an oversquare cylinder (or disk) of diameter d and height h. Resulting instrument is remarkable for optical properties maintained in common with the original lens, despite a to-all-appearances-catastrophic collapse along its major- (also focal-) axis.
Folding an acoustic horn in order to better fit an arbitrary container leaves its acoustic properties largely unchanged.
Quite apart from crowdsourced content, groupthink, or herd mentality, the wisdom of crowds is not an oxymoron. Also called the "hive mentality," it is most commonly described by invoking the example of gumballs in a jar:
Japan's inexorable abandonment of hive mentality is related to the]] contraction of its global stature.
While everything from contact lenses to tin-can telephones might qualify as hacks of Mother Nature, the ability to assume fundamental control of a complex system--as in gene therapy--makes science more powerful than superstition.