Apparently the most enviable species on the planet is not the ant eater. Far from it, in fact. It's the mantis shrimp.
Look at that guy. He can do so many things that you can't. Specifically, he's got 11 or 12 primary colors ranging from infrared to ultraviolet and can apparently, as researchers have recently discovered, also see six forms of polarization. You see something like one form. An interesting fact from the linked press release is that "the physics we used to understand what was going on [in the mantis shrimp's eye] is the same physics that we use in quantum computing for optimal storage of information."
Via The Great Beyond.
2 comments:
Wow! Somehow I didn't catch that you'd been posting. I guess I've been so busy! Now I'm all pleasantly surprised. :)
As an aside, my biomedical engineering dudes are all excited about the possibility of training tactile inputs to human invisible spectra... See in infared through your fingertips?
I'm interested to know how intuitive this sort of technology would be. Might V1 wire differently if an infant used this through critical periods?
But... how does it taste? :D
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