It looks like a toy some child let fall overboard while on a ship in the ocean, but the Rossia pacifica (known as the stubby squid) is entirely real and the video is here to prove it. Spotted by E/V Nautilus off the coast of California at a depth of nearly 3,000 feet, the strange creature looks surreal, like some manufactured object or painted anime character.

“This species spends life on the seafloor,” say the spotting researchers, “activating a sticky mucus jacket and burrowing into the sediment to camouflage, leaving their eyes poking out to spot prey like shrimp and small fish.” It may not be a Pokemon, but it does stir a certain urge to want to start collecting these exotic critters … or at least start capturing them in close-up, high-resolution, and well-lit videos like the one above.

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Using a substance found in deep-sea fish and sometimes used to treat night blindness in humans, a search group has been able to develop a way for people to see up to 150 feet in the dark.

In “people becoming superhuman” news, a small independent research group has figured out how to give humans night vision, allowing them identify faces at over 50 meters in the dark for a short time. Developed by Science for the Masses near Los Angeles, California, the technique involves dropping 50 microliters of Ce6 into the conjunctival sac of the patient’s eye, which then carries the chemical on to the retina.

Subsequent testing showed an uncanny ability to spot even small objects dozens of feet away, and to fully distinguish human faces at much greater distances in natural darkness with 100% accuracy, something only a third of untreated test subjects could do. Their work has yielded the paper A Review on Night Enhancement Eyedrops Using Chlorin e6.

The mission here goes beyond giving everyday people access to transhuman abilities – it is also about opening up scientific curiosity and experimentation for the mass population, obviating the need for lab equipment and encouraging others to create or repeat experiments on their own (at everyone’s own risk, of course – do not try this at home!).

The post Biohackers Can Inject Eyeballs with Temporary Night Vision first appeared on Gajitz.

The eye is an extremely complex organ – no matter what species of animal. The human eye is sensitive enough to recognize more than 500 shades of grey. Our depth of field is excellent, but we lack the wide-angle range of the eyes of a fly. A hybrid human/fly eye was inevitable.

Associate Professor of biomedical engineering and ophthalmology at Ohio State University, Yi Zhao has come up with an experimental lens that would combine the depth of field capabilities of the human eye with the wide-angle capabilities of an insect eye. “Our eye can change focus. An insect eye is made of many small optical components that can’t change focus but give a wide view. We can combine the two,” says Zhao. “What we get is a wide-angle lens with depth of field.”

The lens can be applied to many different fields of technology, from laparoscopy and microscopes to smartphone cameras. Its ability to correct focus by altering its shape could also give surgeons more confidence. With delicate procedures such as tumor removal, it will allow them a wide-angle view while easily gauging the proximity of lens to tissue. It’s another great example of how biomimicry can change our view of the world – quite literally.

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