ABOVE: A mouse retinal slice with rods shown in green, Müller glia in red, and nuclei in blue
CREDIT: TIAN XUE
Without night vision goggles, mammals have no hope of seeing infrared light, which has wavelengths longer than light on the visible spectrum. But in a study published today (February 28) in Cell, researchers injected nanoparticles into mouse retinas, giving the rodents the ability to see near-infrared (near-IR) light at about half the resolution of visible light.
“This is one of the most original and creative papers I’ve seen in a while,” says Cris Niell, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon who did not participate in the work. “They achieved near-IR vision, not by engineering the brain or the retina itself, but [by using] physics to convert the infrared to green light,” he tells The Scientist, “and the beauty of that is that it lets the retina and the rest ...
