Ahhhhh! That makes sense now! 
Maybe it needs a different molecule, then? Who said it has to be L-opsin, after all?
Which is kind of why I donāt want it. Iām well evolved to work in daylight color, and how would IR interfere with that. If I end up just interpreting IR as a color, how do I turn it off? What I really need is another layer of vision consciousness. Then weād be cooking with gas.
Likeā¦ just another color? Most likely that. Youād see much more differences in various substances.
Exactly like when you want to turn off another color - tinted glasses. In this case, NIR-tinted glasses. Or contact lenses. Or lens replacement, like done with cataracts but with added IR dye in the material, if it would have to be permanent.
That would be a little nicer. But less directly achievable. But once in place, we could integrate all sorts of external data, including those from electronic add-ons. Long-wave IR (and UV and xrays and all sorts of chemosensingā¦), here we are!
The core question here is how to add such layers for arbitrary sensorics. Then the possibilities are wide-open.
But the baby steps first!
Re chemosensingā¦ would it be possible to gene-mod some of the receptors to smell methane or carbon monoxide or other such potentially dangerous industrial gases? From what I saw about cystic fibrosis gene-therapies on lungs, an approach with the genes vectored in e.g. aerosolized liposomes could work, but would have to be repeated periodically.
There is two-photon excitation for NIR vision, but it only works for IR-laser levels of flux:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/50/E5445.abstract
You have that already, with night vision, when your retina switches between cones and rod signals.
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David was nauseated by the sun recently.
(yes. Iāve been playing Dwarf Fortress)
I had to moderate my initial, instinctive rejection of that idea after looking at the background papers. Sounds like for every rhodopsin-based pigment (assembled from vit.A1, retinol) there is a corresponding porphyropsin pigment (assembled from vit.A2, dehydroretinol), with about 2/3 the sensitivity, but the whole absorption spectrum shifted about 30 nm. towards longer wavelengths (I learned something new today). And the metabolic pathways will work on dehydroretinol if retinol isnāt available. So nothing wrong with the concept.
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I had my wisdom teeth removed without being put under: I was totally fine. My surgeon was hilarious so it was actually pretty fun, even with a severely compacted right lower wisdom tooth. Bloody, but fun. Dentists donāt make me anxious at all, in fact. Drill, baby, drill!
I had an abortion under ātwilightā: It was easy peasy. My sprained ankle was worse, but I didnāt even bother going to urgent care for that (I was broke; it was definitely sprained).
I once had an abscess just inside my butt hole (sorry not sorry for the TMI) which took four trips to the hospital and three separate drainings with only local anesthetic and no pain killers (percocet makes me itch): The doctors were super impressed by my ability to stay perfectly still while they literally sliced open my butt hole and squeeeezed out the infection, while I was totally awake and the local anesthetic did not work. (Still not sorry about the TMI.)
EVERY TIME I GET A PRESSURE CHECK ON MY EYES: FULL BLOWN PANIC ATTACK. EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. (I take a half xanax first if I can, but I donāt always have it.)
In other words, I wear glasses. Not contacts.
Thatās it, man. Game over, man. Game over. I say we take off and nuke the entire thread from orbit. Itās the only way to be sure.
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The only reason I bring this up is because I know TWO people who are going through something similar right now. Apparently itās pretty common! I felt so much less alone! (PS IT IS AWFUL.)
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In this context, this reply IS THE BEST.
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I had one just under my tooth. Despite being located on the opposite end, it was a pain in the ass. Double so for being initially misdiagnosed due to being a little unusual.
ā¦I designed a Peltier-element based āicepackā then, so instead of roundtrips to the fridge for ice one could just be wired to a laptop power supply. Did not make a prototype yet, should. It will be open-hardware, most likely with just a simple PWM regulator.
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Do you know how much one uses your butt hole? Like, a lot. Every time you cough, for exampleā¦
That said, any issue with your teeth or near your teeth or anywhere that close to your brain is THE WORST.
Especially if its plugged into a USB port.
WTF?!??!
One finds a lot about unexpected uses of body parts once they get out of order.
And there are especially interesting combinations there; for example sciatica+diarrhea+cough, aka triple whammy.
This was merely next to the worst; I was lucky in that being in the lower jaw. Was an interesting week, but a stash of strong painkillers kept for unforeseen emergencies made it survivable without loss of much of my few remaining marbles. (Once the thing built up its xray signature, they finally diagnosed it right. Until then, ouch.)
We need $20 medical imaging devices built into cellphonesā¦ A brief off-the-cuff internet search shown that sonography is useful for imaging of dental abscesses, inter alia, and todayās microelectronics makes the piezo transducers the only problematic part (until somebody goes to Shenzhen and brings back a million of them, $5 a pop).
Sadly, this is a bit outside of my current level of skills. Maybe later. (If I find why that Arduino Leonardo based prototype (that chip is a godsend!) of a usb-audio input device is crashing the snd-pcm-oss driver, there may be multichannel USB āsoundcardsā for microphone arrays. First prototypes for accelerometers and relatively slow signals, later rebuilt on FPGA platform for more channels and higher speed. And with sync inputs and ability to timestamp the signals, for advanced shenanigans like GPS-synced opensource microphone/sonar/geophone arrays for atmospheric, marine and geology research and low-budget defense applications.But thatās mid to far future and there are two devils crammed into every detail. When you get quiet for a while, youāll hear them laughing.)
Ultrasonic imaging is also handy for servicing. A thing for imaging cracks in steel or composites is pretty close to a thing imaging tissues. Todo: literature research, find how close.
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This beaver did not appreciate the unexpected insertion of a USB-compatible pinecone.
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It can also be achieved by a combination of methylene blue and mescaline, and iodine applied topically. The unfortunate side-effect is that then you see the Vitons.
In the proposed dietary hack (linked by Shadduck), IR would simply be red (because itās stimulating L-cones but not M-cones), like other wavelengths longer than 650 nm.
The hack would affect all the visual pigments, shifting all of their absorption spectra the same amount. So a yellow light (for instance) would stimulate the M-cones a little bit more, and the L-cones a little bit less. The overall affect would be like seeing everything under slightly bluer illumination.
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