This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Karen Hopkin.Tired of having to reach for your night-vision goggles when you want to track someone’s heat signature after dark?Well, biotech may someday come to the rescue for all of you aspiring spies.Because researchers have developed an injectable, nanoscale antenna, which they’ve used to allow mice to see beyond their normal visual spectrum and into the infrared.The work appears in the journal Cell.Like all mammals, we humans are only able to see light in the visible spectrum, which includes all of the colors of the rainbow.That limitation is due to the photoreceptors in our eyes being only able to detect radiation with a wavelength of around 400 to 700 nanometers,which means we can’t see infrared and near-infrared light, which has wavelengths a little bit longer.And that got scientists thinking.“So we always curious on whether we can use any method or technique to allow us to be able to see near-infrared or infrared light.”Tian Xue of the University of Science and Technology of China.He reached out to his colleague Gang Han at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who engineered a teeny tiny device, which he calls an “up-conversion nanoparticle.”“We actually developed nanoparticles, so-called up-conversion nanoparticles, that actually can effectively be activated by this near-infrared light.”
