![\"\\u200bThe](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/u200bthe-colour-closest-resembles-a-light-teal.jpg\")
<\/p>\nScientists have achieved what was previously thought impossible by creating a new colour that exists beyond the normal range of human vision. <\/p>\n
The groundbreaking discovery, published today in Science Advances, saw researchers use precision laser technology to enable five participants to perceive an extraordinarily saturated bluish-green hue they’ve named “olo”.<\/p>\n
The breakthrough came from a team at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed a technique to stimulate specific cone cells in the human retina.<\/p>\n
By targeting only the M cone cells responsible for detecting green wavelengths, they bypassed the natural limitations of human colour perception that have confined us to viewing fewer than 10 million colours.<\/p>\n
The colour closest resembles a light teal<\/p>\n
GETTY<\/p>\n
Human vision relies on three types of cone cells in the retina, each detecting different wavelengths of light.<\/p>\n
S cones respond to short wavelengths perceived as blue, M cones to medium wavelengths seen as green, and L cones to long wavelengths appearing as red. These signals combine in the brain to create our full-colour experience. However, a fundamental limitation exists.<\/p>\n
Ren Ng, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, explained: “There’s no light in the world that can activate only the M cone cells because, if they are being activated, for sure one or both other types get activated as well.”<\/p>\n
This overlap between cone responses has historically restricted the range of colours humans can perceive.<\/p>\n
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS<\/strong><\/p>\n The Emerald City was the inspiration behind the technique<\/p>\n GETTY<\/p>\n The team named their technique “Oz” after the Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City. “The name comes from the Wizard of Oz, where there’s a journey to the Emerald City, where things look the most dazzling green you’ve ever seen,” Ng explains.<\/p>\n The experimental setup was far from comfortable. Participants entered a darkened laboratory filled with “lasers, mirrors, deformable mirrors, modulators, light detectors,” according to Ng, who was among the test subjects alongside two other study co-authors.<\/p>\n Each participant had to bite down on a bar to keep their head completely still whilst lasers mapped their retinal cone cells. <\/p>\n The precision laser then delivered light exclusively to M cone cells, creating a thumbnail-sized square of unprecedented colour in their vision.<\/p>\n The colour is closest to #00ffcc<\/p>\n WIKICOMMONS<\/p>\n Ng describes olo as “blue-green with unprecedented saturation” – a perception the brain created in response to signals it had never before received. <\/p>\n The closest approximation on a computer screen would be teal, specifically the hexadecimal code #00ffcc, though olo extends far beyond any displayable colour.<\/p>\n Verification experiments confirmed participants were seeing beyond normal human vision. When white light was added to desaturate olo, it matched a standard teal laser.<\/p>\n “It’s a fascinating study, a truly groundbreaking advance in the ability to understand the photoreceptor mechanisms underlying colour vision,” Manuel Spitschan from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists have achieved what was previously thought impossible by creating a new colour that exists beyond the normal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4318],"tags":[105,4434,70,512,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-201212","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-nutrition","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-sgg","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114718538774324725","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\\u200bThe](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/u200bthe-emerald-city.jpg\")
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