That’s much better than this stupid flashlight I’ve foolishly been using.
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/me waves at antinous
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Who needs that, “I put redbull in my coffee and now I can see sounds.”
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If you feed it booze, will it barf rainbow?
Yeah, but only after you add Skittles.
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You are a twisted person.
I like that.
So they’ve started creating a real life Trial of the Grasses? I’d ask for my money back if they don’t end up with cat’s eyes.
To sum up their research report: One research subject, fully dark-adapted. Four controls, no mention of dark adaptation at all. Oddly enough the dark-adapted subject displayed better night vision.
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I was expecting this:
Four Daimoni had picked him up and spun him so deftly that the guards never understood how their Governor lost all his clothes in a trice. One of the Daimoni must have stunned him or hypnotized him; he could not cry out. Indeed, afterwards, he could not even remember much of what they did.
The guards themselves had gasped when they saw the Daimoni pull endless needles out of their boss’ eyeballs without having noticed the needles go in. They had lifted their weapons when the Governor of Night turned a violent fluorescent green in color, only to gasp, writhe, and vomit when the Daimoni poured enormous bottles of medicine into him. In less than half an hour they stood back.
The Governor, naked and blotched, sat on the ground and vomited.
One of the Daimoni said quietly to the guards, “He’s not hurt, but he and his heirs will see part of the ultraviolet band for many generations to come."
DISAPPOINTED.
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If I could get night vision and slitted pupils (these are merely pretty unless really functional, so optional not-a-must), I’d go for it.
Passive dark glasses or even goggles are way cheaper and way more reliable than night-vision electronics.
A gene therapy, similar to the experimental color-blindness one, could possibly have some use here, for more lasting results. Could the tapetum lucidum layer be grown that way?
Is that the new version of Google Glass paranoia? “How do I know I’m not going to be embarrassed if people see me at different wavelengths?”
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This Chlorin-6 is described as a chlorophyll relative – a porphyrin ring, without the central manganese atom – which means it’s also a relative of heme.
[Dramatic chord]
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The guy in the picture looks like he is developing cataracts and will soon go blind.
Just sayin’
Actually an interesting concern. See the brouhaha around some Sony video cameras that were able to be tricked to work in near-IR even in daylight (a functionality later removed in firmware, due to “public concerns”), and turned out that some fabrics, often of swimsuits, are opaque and black in visible light but translucent in near-IR.
I can imagine similar situations with NIR-augmented eyes. Except that there will be no firmware patch to remove the functionality, once installed.
People’s worries about being seen naked strike me as the kind of “privacy” which is useless.
I speculated about this in a past thread, when complaining about people’s apathy when forced to actually do something to protect privacy. If people had to choose between acting to fix a situation of having no privacy in their finances and communications - or being seen on the toilet, the masses would quickly and overwhelmingly sell out themselves and their families future to not be seen on the toilet. Because it matters so much in the grand scheme of things.
People are weird.
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I can’t even imagine Near-IR-augmented eyes. If there were any easy way to hack rhodopsin to extend its absorption spectrum to less-energetic IR photons, without the body’s own heat setting it off, I suspect that evolution would already be on the job.
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Different mammal lineages have evolved their own tapetum lucidum independently, so it can’t be that hard. But there are downsides. Cats lose some spatial acuity from having a mirror behind their eyeballs, because it’s not a very good mirror, and the reflected photons are bounced back at different angles. There are also problems, oddly enough, with oxygen supply to the retina, which is never very good at the best of times; some of the oxygen to your outer retinal layers is diffusing through from outside your eyeball, so if Evolution disrupts that by putting a mirror in the way, Evolution will have to compensate with other changes elsewhere.
I can, and waaaaaaaaaant.
You are thinking about far IR. Near-IR is emitted by objects at couple 100s degrees. The human-warmth-capable imagers operate at 8-12 micrometers.
The near-IR capability can be reportedly achieved by dietary change, by replacing vitamin A1 with vitamin A2. Which leads me to the hypothesis that a gene tweak is possible.
Evolution is a lazy bitch that tends to stop at good-enough, and do things the easy way. Has some nice hacks, but would work way better if helped along a little.
Didn’t know that. Could be worked around by omitting the reflective layer at the center (so boosting just the peripheral vision), or by nanostructuring the layer into prisms, or augmenting technologically (self-assembly with externally added nanoparticles?).
The self-assembly can also work with other nanoparticles. I can imagine functionalized semiconductor ones, that would go further into IR sensitivity than the purely biological systems could. Inject a suspension of those, and they get bound to the gene-engineered binding sites in or on the cells.
A problem, definitely, but “only” a technical one.
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This group studies “Non-institutional open-source science.”
You know what they call non-institutional open-source science that has been proven by repeatable results?
SCIENCE.
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No, I was thinking of near-IR. There are studies that found that the performance of the L-opsin, in the red end of its sensitivity spectrum, at low light levels, is limited by random false positives from thermal noise triggering it (so the problem would be worse for IR-sensitive opsins).
I can be even vaguer if you like.
