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If given the choice, what would your superpower be?
For many, invisibility or the ability to fly would top the list, while reading minds and talking to animals would appeal to others. And, for a small number, night vision might well be the preferred option too.
If you fall into the latter camp, good news is on the cards: you can throw away those infrared night-vision goggles, because scientists in China have invented a contact lens that will allow you to perceive infrared light – even when your eyes are closed.
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Recently published in the journal Cell, the invention has been tested on both mice and humans, with clear results.
These contact lenses – visually indistinguishable from regular contact lenses – enable the wearer to see infrared light of multiple wavelengths, whilst having their usual vision unobstructed too.
That’s because the team developed the lenses using the polymers that comprise your everyday soft contact lenses, but with the inclusion of nanoparticles that convert infrared light into wavelengths that mammals can see.
And the lenses were a success in both rounds of testing. Mice wearing the lenses avoided areas of infrared light while their lens-free counterparts were totally unaware of the presence of the wavelengths, whilst their pupils constricted and brain scans showed reactions in their visual processing centers too.
Meanwhile in human testing, wearers were able to detect flashing infrared signals, though there was one caveat – they were able to see it better with their eyes closed, without the additional distraction of visible light.
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Though this is the stuff of our cyber dreams, as the paper’s senior author Tian Xue explained in a statement, the lenses have many practical applications:
“Our research opens up the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people super-vision. There are many potential applications right away for this material. For example, flickering infrared light could be used to transmit information in security, rescue, encryption or anti-counterfeiting settings.”
And the lenses – and related spectacles that the team are currently developing – could have a more everyday use too, allowing color blind people to differentiate between colors, as Xue continued:
“By converting red visible light into something like green visible light, this technology could make the invisible visible for color blind people.”
As the project continues, this could really take human vision into the future.
Not so scary now are you, darkness?
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.