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Jewish World Review How your night vision works By Marshall Brain http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT) Imagine the following situation. It is 3 a.m., and you wake up needing to use the restroom. Not wanting to awaken your significant other, you get up without turning the lights on. Even though the room is very dark, you can see pretty well - well enough to avoid running into things. Once you get to the bathroom and close the door, you turn the lights on. After using the facilities, you turn the lights off and try to get back to bed. The problem is, you can't see a thing. Turning on the lights has totally destroyed your night vision, and the bedroom is now pitch black. You have to stand there for a couple of minutes waiting for your night vision to return. The obvious question is: What happened? Why does it take your night vision several minutes to activate? It turns out that, by answering this question, you can learn quite a bit about how your eyes work. One of the most amazing things about human vision is the incredible range it has. We can see in very bright sunlight, and we can also see in nearly total darkness. Three things make this range possible. The first and most obvious is the pupil, which contracts and expands depending on the amount of light. Your pupils get small when the light is bright to let less light in. They get big when it is dark to let more light in. Light coming through your pupils lands on your retinas, and this is interesting: our retinas actually have two separate systems working together. One system uses a set of cells called rods, and the other uses a set of cells called cones. Cone cells can see colors, but they only work in bright light. Rod cells perceive black and white images and are able to work in low light. It is the rods that provide your night vision. But why the delay? That's caused by a chemical called Rhodopsin, which is found in the rods. Rhodopsin is the key to night vision - it is the chemical that the rods use to absorb photons and perceive light. When a molecule of rhodopsin absorbs a photon, it splits into two molecules: a retinal and an opsin. These molecules recombine naturally back into rhodopsin at a fixed rate, and recombination is fairly slow. It takes several minutes. So, when you expose your eyes to bright light, all of the rhodopsin breaks down into retinal and opsin. If you then turn out the lights and try to see in the dark, you can't. The cones need a lot of light, so they are useless, and there is no rhodopsin now so the rods are useless, too. Over the course of several minutes, however, the retinal and opsin recombine back into rhodopsin, and you can see again. A fun fact: The retinal used in the eye is derived from vitamin A. If your diet is low in vitamin A, there is not enough retinal in the rods and therefore not enough rhodopsin. People who lack vitamin A often suffer from night blindness - they cannot see at all in the dark. Some animals - dogs, cats and deer for example - can see in the dark even better than human beings. That's because the retinas of these animals have a special reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum that acts almost like a mirror at the backs of their eyes. Light reflects off the tapetum lucidum, giving a scene more illumination. If you shine a flashlight or headlights into the eyes of these animals at night, their eyes shine back brightly. Humans don't have this tapetum lucidum layer in their retinas. If you shine a flashlight in a person's eyes at night, you don't see any sort of reflection. The flash on a camera is bright enough, however, to cause a reflection off of the retina - what you see is the red color from the blood vessels nourishing the eye. One way to reduce red eye in photographs is to flash a bright light right before taking the picture. The light causes the pupils to contract, blocking most of the red reflection. This is how the "red eye reduction" feature on most cameras works. The flash fires once to close your pupils, and a second time to take the picture. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Previously: How concentrating solar collectors work How your key fob works How the common cold works How the Large Hadron Collider Works How making a TV show works How dry cleaning works How exoskeletons work How an oil refinery works How landfills work How the Orion spacecraft works The cutting edge in HDTV Redefining the CD How the HDMI cable scam works How glow-in-the-dark toys work How the subprime mortgage crisis works How gift cards work How Tasers work How giant TV screens work How foreclosure works How Air Force One works How wildfire fighting works How vitamins work How ejection seats work How reattaching limbs works How hot air balloons work How paparazzi work How counterfeiting works How CDs work How the Edsel worked How Stinger missiles work How hybrid cars work How sharks work How mosquitoes work How diesel engines work How water towers work How the Dawn mission works How Kassam rockets work How the North American Eagle works Why aren't we flying to work? How tofu and soy milk work How Colony Collapse Disorder works How airbags work How the U.S. income tax works How gum works How caffeine works How Daylight Saving Time works How a cruise missile works How snow making works © 2007, How Stuff Works Inc. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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