New Delhi: In a game-changing new invention, scientists in China have developed infrared vision contact lenses. Think spy or military movies where characters wear night vision goggles to be able to see in the dark, but better. These new contact lenses allow a person to see even with their eyes closed.
A study on the wearable upconversion contact lenses that grant humans near-infrared spatiotemporal color vision was published in peer-reviewed journal Cell on 22 May, describing the findings.
Infrared is basically light whose wavelength is too high to be visible to the naked human eye, but some aids can help with it.
Without visible light sources, like during the night, infrared vision helps a lot, but usually, to convert infrared light to visible light, you need a power source. Now, researchers have developed these lenses that don’t even need a power source, and allow those using these lenses to see infrared light even when their eyes are closed because infrared light penetrates the eyelids too. Read more here.
11-bn year old cosmic ‘joust’
Scientists have observed an 11 billion-year-old cosmic fight between two galaxies using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. Galaxies don’t actually fight but these two have been observed by a group of international scientists as colliding into each other with such force and radiation that it almost seems like a fight or a ‘joust’.
A study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature describes how in this collision, one of the galaxies has a quasar, which is the core of a supermassive black hole that releases tons of radiation, and this quasar is directly attacking the other galaxy. Due to the powerful ALMA, which is a Very Large Telescope (VLT), scientists say that for the first time ever they have been able to observe how a quasar’s radiation affects a galaxy.
They noticed that this radiation is directly impacting star formation in the galaxy by disrupting the gas and dust clouds.
The study is a step in the right direction as it is the first time ever that we’ve been able to observe such a galactic collision with such detailed analysis. Read more here.
Can you swim without a brain?
Next up is a study from Vienna’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Vienna, and Tufts University and Harvard University in the US, where researchers are looking to understand whether swimming movements are possible in organisms without a brain or a central nervous system. Technically, even an amoeba, a single-celled organism with no brain and bones or muscles, can swim.
But what causes this swimming motion? According to computer simulations run by the researchers, it happens because of something that resembles a neural network, even in organisms with no brain. Simply put, this simulation showed that small chemical and physical signals can help organisms move in a swimming motion, without the need for a sophisticated nervous system. Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on 8 May.
This simulation is useful, said the study, not just because it helps in understanding how organisms with no brains swim, but also because it can help program artificial nanobots for purposes like delivering medicine through the bloodstream. Read more here.
Mouth-taping can have serious health risks
Finally, keeping up with Instagram health influencers might have brought to light a new trend of mouth-taping being promoted by many people while sleeping. The idea is to put a piece of duct tape across one’s mouth when asleep to prevent mouth breathing. Well, a Canadian paper in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One says the activity has no real health benefits and could even worsen some forms of sleep apnea in people.
Sleep apnea is a disorder where people have trouble breathing or have shallow breathing during their sleep, and especially if people aren’t aware of their sleep apnea, it could be really harmful for them to tape their mouth shut during the night since it will restrict their airflow.
It could also lead to serious implications like heart disease. It’s why the paper reiterates the age-old advice—health decisions need to be made based on scientific evidence, not social media fads. Read more here.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)