Then, in some trick of the light, or because she sagged her chin into her wrinkling neck, or her too short trousers rode up above her ankle socks as she was sitting cross-legged, Ally saw for a moment the old woman she would become, vulnerable and stubborn, cut adrift.

NEWYORKER: She��s the One

Since this was a classified mission for the Department of Defense (you know, to handle super secret military stuff), the shuttle's crew was forced to encrypt the images of the damaged tiles it sent back to NASA, which lowered the resolution of the images enough that the ground crew wrote off the damage as a trick of the light.

ENGADGET: Space Shuttle Atlantis ends its run of predicting disaster for other NASA shuttles

With a different hole design, crystal fibres can do the opposite trick as well, spreading the light much more evenly across the width of the fibre and thereby reducing non-linear effects.

ECONOMIST: A new approach to making optical fibres

Europe's Planck telescope, which last week showed us a picture of the oldest light streaming across the Universe, has another trick up its sleeve.

BBC: Planck telescope: A map of all the 'stuff' in the cosmos