The dry landscape garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, a UNESCO world heritage site, intrigues hundreds of thousands of visitors every year with its abstract, sparse and seemingly random composition of rocks and moss on an otherwise empty rectangle of raked gravel. Here we apply a model of shape analysis in early visual processing to show that the 'empty' space of the garden is implicitly structured and critically aligned with the temple's architecture. We propose that this invisible design creates the visual appeal of the garden and was probably intended as an inherent feature of the composition.

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A neglected theory of aesthetics by the eminent Gestaltist Kurt Koffka is reviewed with the hope that it will spark new interest in the Gestalt contribution to art. Koffka’s particular emphasis on the art object, its perceptual qualities and its relation with the intentional self holds the potential for advancing scientific theories of aesthetic experience.

Iron(II) should be oxidised to iron(III) before the neutralisation of acid water with limestone, otherwise the oxidation will occur downstream of the neutralisation plant with the formation of acid (reactions 1 and 2). This study aimed at investigating the effect of surface area of the medium that supports bacterial growth on the rate of biological iron(II) oxidation. The study showed that the biological iron(II) oxidation rate is directly proportional to the square root of the medium specific surface area.