In the near future, the US military may trade their night vision goggles for a direct prick that will allow them to see in the dark. This process, developed by scientists from the United States and China, has already proven effective in laboratory mice. The researchers are confident that this will work in humans as well.
Today American soldiers wear large, bulky glasses that allow them to see in the dark. These devices use infrared sensors to capture heat sources by drawing an image of a person's surroundings based on the radiated heat.
Night vision goggles (NVGs), while effective, are expensive, bulky, require electrical energy to operate, and are often lost or broken in combat. NVGs also severely limit the user's field of view, making it look like viewing the world through a tube from a roll of toilet paper. This can create a false perspective of the security of the environment of the owner of the device, which in wartime can be critical.
However, in a laboratory study conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Medicine, researchers created specific nanoparticles that converted infrared light into visible light. After that, the solution with these particles was injected into the eyeballs of the mice.
Next, the injected mice were placed in a dark maze, in which they were together with the mice that did not receive injections. As it was found during the test, mice that received injections of nanoparticles could easily find a way out, as if the experiment were carried out in daylight.
The mechanics of the effect obtained was as follows: nanoparticles that capture the infrared spectrum bind to the photoreceptors of the retina of the eyes of mice and provide night vision. The duration of the effect was about 10 weeks without any side effects.
Xue Tian, a Chinese scientist who participated in the experiment, believes that the technology should work on humans. Nevertheless, there are a number of problems that must be solved before ampoules with such injections begin to enter the troops.
First, until scientists conduct human trials, we will not reliably know how effective nanoparticles are, what this effect is and how well people will see in the dark.
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Secondly, not knowing how effective this technology is, experimenters will not be able to compare it with technologies that already exist. That is, with the same night vision goggles, the production of which has been established and which have long been supplied to the troops. It is possible that for superiority over NVG, the new technology will have to be significantly improved.
Thirdly, if the effect of night vision is not included in the injection at the genetic level, which is also being worked on, but lasts only 10 weeks, then this will require frequent repeated injections. For soldiers stationed in war zones, where unsanitary conditions often reign, such injections are impossible, since an injection in the eye is not an injection under the skin and at the slightest infection there will be serious complications.
Finally and fourthly: an injection into the eyeball, even with modern very thin and very sharp needles, is still very painful.
On the other hand, for all sorts of special units, the duration of the effect of 70 days is simply excessive: their operations are much shorter and often last from several hours to several days. At the same time, injection night vision will save several kilograms of mass that the soldier must carry on himself: glasses, batteries, etc.
In addition, with injection night vision, a fighter of a sabotage unit becomes less vulnerable: he is not afraid of snow, dirt and rain, from which you need to constantly wipe the eyepieces. He can run through dense thickets and not be afraid to leave glasses somewhere on a protruding branch of the jungle.
He will not be sensitive to sharp flashes of light (for example, close explosions of grenades), which are somewhat dazzling with night vision devices. Finally, without glasses, the saboteur can engage in hand-to-hand combat.
Thus, the advantages of the new system are quite obvious and the Pentagon is obviously looking forward to human tests.