Island Tribes Develop Superior Underwater Vision

Artifice_Eternity writes "I found this Washington Post article fascinating. A tribe of skilled divers known as "sea gypsies" have developed a previously unknown physiological adaptation that gives them better vision underwater. Most humans see poorly underwater, because water has a similar refractive index to the fluid inside the eye, making it difficult to focus incoming light. But children of the Moken tribe compensate by shrinking their pupils (the same way photographers reduce a camera's aperture size to increase sharpness). Their underwater visual acuity is more than double that previously thought possible in humans. The article also describes other adaptations discovered in recent years that challenge our understanding of what the human body and brain can do." (Painless non-registration demographic click-through required.)

Comments

demographic collector broken?

[Danny Rathjens]

I haven't been able to read any washington post articles since they started doing the demographic collector thing. (I used to often follow links to it from news.google.com)

I fill it in, and it sends me back to the same page.

I am using mozilla 1.4b, and it happened with previous versions.

I do not have cookies blocked for washingtonpost.com.

Any idea what I need to do to get by this thing?