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JANUARY 10, 2020
AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
EYE
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BODY PARTS: THE OCCASIONAL SERIES
2020: THE YEAR OF THE
It’s probably no surprise that you’re reading an article about the eye in this first issue of the year. This year in particular. After all, it’s 2020, right? On the Chinese calendar this may be the Year of the Rat, but everywhere else it’s definitely the Year of the Eye. There is no question that eyes are body royalty. Sight is universally judged to be the most precious of our senses. There is no other organ by which we learn so much about the world around us. We use our eyes in almost everything we do. Despite their vital importance, our eyes are small organs, only about an inch in diameter. A golf ball, by comparison, has a diameter of about an inch and a half. What eyes may lack in size, they more than make up for in performance. They are full-color, automatically focusing motion picture cameras. Their lens has a feature that instantly adjusts to light conditions from very bright to near total darkness. They have a Steadi-Cam-like feature, enabling us to see perfectly well while running, or to maintain focus on a stationary object while our head rotates in any direction. Speaking of visual tech, our eyes also possess DVR-like recording capabilities; images we have viewed can be recalled years and even decades later. Our eyes can clearly view tiny objects up close or focus sharply on stars in distant galaxies, and according to scientists they can detect an astonishing 10 million colors. Oops. Using our eyes we just spotted an error in the previous sentence. Technically speaking, eyes don’t actually see objects. They see the light that objects give off or reflect. Those light rays enter the eye through the lens and hit the rods and cones that cover the back wall of the eye, the retina. The retina is covered with rods and cones, some 120 million rods and 6 million cones. Take a moment to ponder those two numbers. The rods, plentiful though they are, enable us to see just shades of gray and in dim light. It is the 6 million cones which enable us to see the aforementioned millions of different colors. Here is another instance where human technology has attempted to imitate nature. Cones register shades of color using the same RGB combinations (red, green, blue) that computer
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