Even newborn chicks know Escher's staircases are impossible  It
turns out that the impossible buildings and bizarre objects
dreamed up by artists like M.C. Escher tap into an incredibly
primal understanding of the world's geometry, a knowledge that
is hard-wired into all vertebrates, including newly hatched
chickens.  Because scientists can kind of be jerks when they
really want to know something, a bunch of researchers at Italy's
University of Trento decided to test how newborn chicks reacted
to impossible shapes - specifically, the Necker cube, in which
the front and back corners overlap in a way that is impossible
in our 3D world. The researchers kept 66 chicks in total
darkness for the first 24 hours after they hatched, just to make
absolutely sure they had no prior visual experience before
undergoing the experiment.  The chicks were then placed in a
small enclosure with drawings of two cubes on the other side.
One of the outlines was of a normal cube while the other
depicted an impossible cube. Two-third