May 30, 2016 at 02:29AM

Today I Learned: 1) A biohacker group called Science for the Masses (they look pretty interesting -- might be worth checking them out for other purposes) has prototyped an eye drop that temporarily increases night vision capabilities. It's based on a chlorophyll-like molecule called chlorin e6, or Ce6, which absorbs red light. According to a 2007 paper, When mice were administered Ce6 (I'm not sure how), they gained the ability to see red light better under low-light conditions. The current hypothesis, from what I gather, is that Ce6 couples to rhodopsins, essentially giving them greater sensitivity to red light. The biohackers dissolved a bunch of Ce6 in salt water along with insulin and DMSO, and pipetted a few drops of the mix into one of their eyes. I'm not sure what the insulin is supposed to do, but DMSO is a chemical that's really good at moving other chemicals through barriers like clothes, gloves, and cell membranes, so it's probably there to help Ce6 diffuse into the retina. The results were promising but not conclusive -- the guy who tried the drops identified objcts at range in the dark much better than four control subjects who didn't receive the drops, but the sample size was small, the study wasn't blind, and there was no correction for baseline differences in identification. In other words, it was sloppily done, so the results aren't solidly convincing. Also, DON'T try this at home, because there's some reason to think administering Ce6 to your eyeball could be dangerous to your eyesight, especially when used repeatedly. Ce6 is currently used medically... to kill tumor cells. Specifically, when it absorbs red light, it dumps out the energy in the form of reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROSs are toxic to cells at high concentration. You can inject a bunch of Ce6 around a tumor and hit it with a red laser or two, producing a whole bunch of ROSs locally around the tumor, hopefully killing it. If you put it in your *eyeball*, then there's a decent chance that if you were exposed to bright light*, you'd have a similar effect, but in your retinas, which you generally don't want to kill. On the other hand, if Ce6 really does complex to rhodopsins, I suspect they're dumping their energy into the rhodopsins instead of producing ROSs... but I wouldn't want to bet my eyesight on that, or on *all* (or even most) of the Ce6 actually getting bound to rhodopsin. For a more thorough review of this particular experiment, check out http://ift.tt/25sFB7C. * The Science for the Masses hacker who tried this put on dark contacts during the test and protected his eyes from light after receiving the drops, which is both a sensible safety precaution and another probable confounder of the experiment if the other subjects didn't. 2) There are apparently decent, controlled studies on the effectiveness of echinacea herb, garlic, vitamin C, and zinc. The results are, respectively: doesn't help colds; probably helps prevent colds and reduce severity, if taken daily, but has side effects; definitely, *definitely* doesn't help colds* unless, maybe, *possibly*, you are undergoing strenuous physical training at high altitudes, and ; might improve outcomes, not enough data to say if it's preventative, and probalby isn't worth the side effects. There have *not* been controlled studies on the effectiveness of either chicken soup or Airborne™ on cold recovery. The company that makes Airborne™ used to claim that it was backed up by a study, but the "study" in question was, in fact, run by two non-doctor, non-scientist fellows, who put together their two-man company specifically to run that one trial. That particular claim has been removed following a class-action lawsuit. Oh, and Airborne™ is *not* approved by the FDA (as a supplement, it doesn't need to be -- this is an important fact, but the way: there are essentially no safety or efficacy requirements other than "it isn't acutely toxic" and "it doesn't claim to do anything medically" for dietary supplements. A company could sell flavored sugar pills, and as long as they labeled it accurately and tell you that it doesn't cure anything, they can claim whatever they want about its effects and sell it to you.) * or, as far as I know, anything else unless you're about to get scurvey -- seriously, vitamin C as a medicine was a crazy idea popularized by Linus Pauling that has *never* panned out clinically, but that loads of companies have latched onto to sell you supplements. Don't bother unless you can't find a cheaper sugar pill. 3) I ran across this article (http://ift.tt/1slQk5m), a design article on Shovel Knight, a modern video game designed to essentially be what would have been developed today if development for the NES had never stopped. It's a cool, quick look at some of the technical limitations of the NES, how programmers of the NES era dealt with those limitations, and which ones the developers decided to abide by which ones they decided to break, and why. Example: large sprites were very difficult to render on the NES, so games like Megaman drew bosses and other large enemies in the background layer rather than as a sprite (or multiple sprites). The only problem is that bosses need a lot of animations, and it's a pain to make a different background for every single animation frame. That's why NES game bosses were usually drawn on black or otherwise dark, uniform backgrounds. This was one place where Shovel Knight remains pretty faithful to the original. They do use sprites for bosses, because that's a heck of a lot easier to do as long as your system can support it, but they kept the dark backgrounds because "We thought that the black background with the huge boss always gave NES games a distinctive and epic feel, where the focus was just on you and your enemy".