Researchers Shoot Lasers at People's Eyes to Help Them See a New Color

Think you've seen all the colors that exist? Maybe not. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Washington have created a new system that controls the eye's photoreceptors to help it see new colors, as reported in the journal Science Advances last week. The system, called Oz, works by activating cone cells in the retina -- in short, firing laser pulses at researchers' eyes -- to push the eye past "spectral sensitivities" and to "elicit a color beyond the natural human gamut." In this case, respondents described the color as a "blue-green of unprecedented saturation." "For many decades, the studies of how humans see and how this capacity fails in disease have been conducted using ex vivo retinal samples extracted post-mortem or in animal models," said Dr. Ramkumar Sabesan, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington School of Medicine who worked on this project. ("Ex vivo" refers to studies on cells that have been removed from a ... Read full article.