Scientists discover never-before-seen color by zapping eye with laser: Off the charts

Scientists in California claim to have discovered a new jaw-dropping color no human has ever seen before.The catch? You have to zap your eyes with laser pulses to see it.Five scientists at the University of Berkeley used laser technology to selectively activate cells in their retinas, to push their vision beyond the natural limits.

The result was a sort of peacock blue-greenish hue with an intensity outside the range of colors normally seen by the human eye.“The level of saturation is off the charts”, Ren Ng, a computer scientist at Berkeley, told Nature.Only five people have seen the mysterious new color — baptized ‘olo.’ But it’s like nothing they’ve ever seen before, they said.“There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor,” Austin Roorda, a vision scientist on the team, 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 it absolutely pales by comparison with the experience of olo.”Ng believes the technology not only creates new colors, but could even pave the way for a treatment for people who are color-blind.The researchers published the study in Science Advances this week....