The amazing eyes of a giant shrimp living on Australia's Great Barrier Reef could hold the key to developing a new type of super high-quality DVD player, British scientists said on Sunday.

Mantis shrimps, dubbed "thumb splitters" by divers because of their vicious claws, have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom.

They can see in 12 primary colors, four times as many as humans, and can also detect different kinds of light polarization -- the direction of oscillation in light waves.

Now a team at the University of Bristol have shown how the shrimps do it, using remarkable light-sensitive cells that rotate the plane of polarization in light as it travels through the eye.

Manmade devices do a similar thing in DVD and CD players but they only work well for one color, while the shrimp's eye operates almost perfectly across the whole visible spectrum from near ultra-violet to infra-red.

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Posted at 12:41PM Oct 25, 2009 by Lou Wallace in Inform  |  Comments[0]