These special arthropods (stomatopods) have 16 visual pigments!
We only have four, and we can see millions of colors.
Their vision is hyperspectral, they can see ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths, as well as polarized light. They have 360 degree vision and three parts of each eye can focus on the same spot, so each individual eye has trinocular vision with depth perception. They have a very large focal range and the eyes can emit light, which is used for communication.
They have the most complex visual organs on the planet.
Highly important approach. The key to scientific breakthroughs lays in understanding its limitations. Also, these are the limits of the human mind which are reflected. Question is whether we would be smart enough just to become progressively smarter. This, without taking into account deeper limits of any knowledge system.
During the recent protest march against the Pope in London, I noticed one sign which read “I believe in science”. This made no sense. The point about science is you don’t have to believe in it. Perhaps the bearer of the sign meant he believed in the power of science to make him happy or fulfilled. Or perhaps he just meant he didn’t believe in God.
Nonsensical posturing about science has become commonplace. This is caused, I think, by the triumphalist tone of the wave, now abating, of popular science books started by Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Physicists used to crow they were on the verge of a “Theory of Everything”, biologists said they had cracked the code of life and neuroscientists, accompanied by certain philosophers, claimed the mystery of consciousness would soon yield.
None of these things was, or is, true. They are not true because all these problems have proved far more complex than anybody expected. But are they also not true for a more profound reason? Are they not true because they are insoluble, because the human mind is incapable of understanding the world fully?
The physicist Russell Stannard thinks this may be the case. He believes that science will eventually come to an end, and that we are living in a “transient age of human development” in which scientific discoveries can be made. But science won’t end because we know everything; it will end because we know everything we can know.
Science, he says, may well not crack, among other things, the problems of consciousness and free will, the ultimate divisibility of space and time, and the true status of mathematics. It may not even be able to establish the existence of the world. An extreme interpretation of quantum theory says that because all we know of the world is obtained by our acts of observation, and because these determine the world we see, we cannot be sure of the existence of anything between those observations. In fact, strictly speaking, the world ceases to exist in this gap.
This, therefore, is an anti-triumphalist book. The more of it you read, the less you discover we know. Stannard argues that there are certain to be limits to science. This raises the further question: are these ultimate limits, or just the limits of the human mind? In other words, could a superior intelligence solve the problems? That is doubly unknowable.
Stannard makes the idea of a limited science more accessible simply by pointing out its actual rather than its conceptual limitations. He pinpoints, for example, the critical difficulty of contemporary neuroscience - that researchers must still rely on the subjective reports of its subjects to match the pictures of the brain seen with fMRI machines with mental events. “There is nothing about these physical patterns of behaviour that in [itself informs] us that they are accompanied by someone having a mental experience.”
Read more at www.newstatesman.com
The subject of this year’s top microscope photo in the 36th annual Nikon Small World competition looks more like neon suspension bridges or sailboats than what it really is: mosquito heart muscle magnified 100 times.
The image, which used flourescence technology to highlight different parts of the specimen, stood out as one of the most beautiful of the entries. And it also had scientific merit as part of the photographer’s research on how mosquitoes carry and spread disease.
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/top-20-microscope-photos-2010/?pid=402&viewall=true#ixzz12HAYRy23
2nd Place
5-day old zebrafish head (20X), Confocal
Dr. Hideo Otsuna, University of Utah Medical Center, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Salt Lake City, Utah
3rd Place
Zebrafish olfactory bulbs (250X), Confocal
Oliver Braubach, Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
4th Place
Wasp nest (10X), Extended Depth of Field Stereomicroscopy
Riccardo Taiariol
La Spezia, SP, Italy
5th Place
Strelitzia reginae (bird of paradise) seed (10X) Darkfield
Viktor Sykora, Institute of Pathophysiology, First Medical Faculty, Charles University
Prague, Czech Republic
9th Place
Ctenocephalides canis (flea) (20X) Fluorescence
Duane Harland, AgResearch Ltd.
Lincoln, New Zealand
10th Place
Crystallized soy sauce (16X), Reflected and Transmitted Light
Yanping Wang, Beijing Planetarium
Beijing, China
12th Place
Juvenile bivalve mollusc, Lima sp. (10X), Darkfield
Gregory Rouse, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
La Jolla, California
19th Place
Wistar rat retina outlining the retinal vessel network and associated communication channels (100X), Confocal
Cameron Johnson, The University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
