Maybe you think the camera built into the back of your phone is all you need. You may be right. But you may also have loftier goals or higher standards.

The Basics

Isn't My Phone Good Enough?
Probably. It's there in your pocket already, and with all of the social sharing apps and filter apps for tricking out your pics, your smartphone's camera very well may be all you need. There are advantages to owning a "real" camera. They perform better in low light, they capture colors more accurately, and they are better at snapping action shots of moving subjects. But if you're just looking for a...

By Kim Krieger, ScienceNOW

The graceful taper of a tree trunk into branches, boughs, and twigs is so familiar that few people notice what Leonardo da Vinci observed: A tree almost always grows so that the total thickness of the branches at a particular height is equal to the thickness of the trunk. Until now, no one has been able to explain why trees obey this rule. But a new study may have the answer.

Leonardo’s rule holds true for almost all species of trees, and graphic artists routinely use it to create realistic computer-generated trees. The rule says that when a tree’s trunk splits ...