- A research team from the University of Stuttgart, Germany and the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland, has harnessed the human eye's color-sensing strengths to give the eye the ability to distinguish between objects that differ in thickness by no more than a few nanometers -- about the thickness of a cell membrane or an individual virus.
- "We were able to demonstrate that the unaided human eye is able to determine the thickness of a thin film -- materials only a few nanometers thick -- by simply observing the color it presents under specific lighting conditions," said Sandy Peterhänsel, University of Stuttgart, Germany and principal author on the paper. The actual testing was conducted at the University of Eastern Finland.
- He concludes that we often underestimate our own abilities. “People often underestimate human senses and their value in engineering and science,” Peterhänsel said in the press release. “This experiment demonstrates that our natural born vision can achieve exceptional tasks that we normally would only assign to expensive and sophisticated machinery.”
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