The MIM-104 'Patriot' Air Defense Battery, the weapon the US and Ukraine said Kyiv's forces used to shoot down the Kinzhal in Ukraine last week, is a surface-to-air missile system designed to, as the US Army characterized it, 'engage and intercept any aerial threats whether it be aircraft or tactical ballistic missiles under any weather conditions.' Valery Gerasimov, who is commanding operations in Ukraine, boasted it was 'invulnerable to air defense capabilities deployed in Ukraine.'Ī general view of a mobile defence surface-to-air missile system, Patriot, before it is transported to Poland from Gnoien, Germany January 23, 2023. Similarly, Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu said last August, as he announced the use of the Kinzhal in Ukraine, that 'no one else has such a missile yet: hypersonic, and with such speed, and with such penetrating capabilities,' arguing, per the state media readout, 'it is impossible neither to detect it nor to intercept.'Īnd in December, Russian Gen. The manufacturer, Rostec, previously claimed 'there is no countermeasure to our missiles.' The Ukrainians recently did what the Kremlin said was impossible and shot down an advanced Russian Kinzhal missile, according to the US and Ukrainian militaries.Ī missile defense expert called the intercept by a Patriot missile 'impressive,' for both the advanced American-made missile defense system and its Ukrainian operators, as it looks like concrete evidence that the powerful Kinzhal missile was never what Russia claimed it was. The Lego illusion works only if the photograph is taken from exactly the correct viewing angle.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. But in a picture taken from another angle ( bottom left), you can see that the edges of the staircase do not meet. In their photograph of the finished sculpture, it looks as if the staircase is continuous.

Lipson and Shiu spent considerable time studying Escher's work before beginning construction. Some of the people are ascending the staircase, while others are descending. The original work by Escher, a 1960 lithograph, shows a large building with an endless staircase on its roof ( bottom right). Escher works in Lego blocks, including this model of Escher's Ascending and Descending ( top). ( bottom right)Īndrew Lipson, a self-described “professional nerd” with no official connection to the Lego Group, and his friend Daniel Shiu have rendered five M. ESCHER'S ASCENDING AND DESCENDING, © 2016 THE M. Unlike classic monuments-such as the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.-which can be perceived by either sight or touch, impossible sculptures can be interpreted (or misinterpreted, as the case may be) only by the visual mind.ĬONSTRUCTION BY ANDREW LIPSON AND DANIEL SHIU PICTURES COURTESY OF A. That is, they are interested in shaping real-world 3-D objects that nonetheless appear to be impossible. Several contemporary sculptors have taken up the challenge of creating impossible art. As long as the local relation between surfaces and objects follows the rules of nature, our brain doesn't seem to mind that the global percept is impossible. They also reveal that our brain constructs the feeling of a global percept-an overall picture of a particular item-by sewing together multiple local percepts. These effects challenge our hard-earned perception that the world around us follows certain, inviolable rules. Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose drew his famously impossible triangle, and visual scientist Dejan Todorović of the University of Belgrade in Serbia created a golden arch that won him third prize in the 2005 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Escher, for instance, depicted reversible staircases and perpetually flowing streams. In an impossible figure, seemingly real objects-or parts of objects-form geometric relations that physically cannot happen.

Impossible shapes