Scientists Hack Human Eye to See a Whole New Color, Called "Olo"

Image by Getty / Futurism Developments The human eye can see millions of colors — but no eyes have ever before beheld "olo." Only five people on the planet have witnessed this brand new color, thanks to the efforts of a team of researchers in California. And to earn this exclusive privilege, they had to fire laser pulses into their eyeballs. As detailed in a new study published in the journal Science Advances, the pulses stimulated specific cells in the participants' retinas without activating the others, producing a hue of unconquerable saturation that's impossible to see naturally. According to the lucky few, the color's closest analog to us unenlightened humans is turquoise — but this apparently doesn't do it justice. "There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor," study coauthor Austin Roorda, a vision scientist at UC Berkeley, told The Guardian. "The whole point is that this is not the color we see, it's just not. The color we see is a version of it, but ... Read full article.