TRANSCRIPT (auto, accuracy estimate)

Shane Hewitt (00:00.99)
When you get to somebody new who is So smart, they’ve got the P the H and the D in there in their name What do you do? Well, I changed my studio colours to pink to match Samantha’s who’s here Because that’s what matters on the radio It does Samantha you mean PhD molecular biologist neuroscientist science communicator

Proud nerd, share your nerd heart with us, Samantha.

Samantha Yammine
Hey Shane, I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for coming. This is pretty cool stuff. There’s some new colours. Apparently I saw that article. It was on CTV news.ca that says, by the way, there’s there’s new colours. Did anybody ask the leprechaun for the rainbow pot of gold? I mean, what is happening here?

Samantha Yammine
This this is probably top five favourite science stories of all time right here. Really? This I am obsessed with this. It’s so cool because it’s one of my favourite things to think about. Like, can you picture a colour you’ve never seen before? A colour that’s never existed? No.

Shane Hewitt (01:15.566)
No, I did did refraction in grade eight. So first of all, I’m obviously the expert in the room here Which consisted of me cutting a box a hole in a box the morning of my project being due With a flashlight and a crystal. I mean really you can see why I didn’t go into science But you’re right if you omit like you can’t imagine a colour like you you truly can’t

It’s kind of impossible, like, besides some animals that can see some infrared or maybe some ultraviolet good night vision. Sure, that I could fathom. But a new colour, I couldn’t. And most of us can, except for these scientists who had this wild idea. They decided that everyone’s trying to invent a new colour by mixing different colours together. And that doesn’t really do it. And instead, they thought, what if I change the pattern

of activation of cells in your eye. What if instead of what the pattern that’s normally activated when you look around at different colours, I just decide I’m going to stimulate just these cells and that’s how they achieved this brand new colour they call Olo.

So that’s fascinating because you know what I’ve always wondered? Well, you know, like what’s your favourite colour? Do you have a favourite?

These days I’m a green girl, think. I change every day.

Shane Hewitt (02:37.176)
Yeah, greens. I would go with greens. A big one for me. I would say probably navy blue is probably like a big one. Classic. You must see it’s it’s it’s mysterious, right? Like at night you might think it’s black, but no, in the daylight it’s navy blue. Like I’m a Gemini. This could be this could be why. But I’ve always wondered that in our eyeballs that do our eyes process the colours differently. And so meaning that I love navy blue because I see

colour A as navy blue, but you love green and maybe colour A for you just is what you call green. Like what if we’re talking about like I see navy blue as blue, but what if you used my eyes? You’d be like, that’s not navy blue. That’s pink. Like we still don’t, we assume we see it all the same. And that’s where my theory is that that’s why we have different favourites because we actually see the colours differently, but I’m not a scientist. So make that sound smart, please.

No, mean, this I have a very strong memory of of being like in a young one of my early science classes, wondering that exact same thing, being like, how do we know that my red is your red? And luckily, scientists have these pretty clever ways to to try to study that a bit more robustly, right? Because they had to, especially for this experiment. And it turns out you have these three special types of cells in your eye that are responsible for us seeing colour. They’re called cones. It’s a very

fun name for them because they’re shaped like a cone. And there’s three different ones and they’ll all get activated to different wavelengths of colour. there’s a trick here is that there’s overlap. So they kind of all activate to some degree when you see any colour. And these scientists were like, what if I just activate one of them only, like one type of cone cell in a special pattern? And that’s how they did it. And then they could study that they were doing it. Like they could live image.

the back of the eye, make sure that they were just shooting these, they call it like a micro dose of lasers. So they were shooting a bunch of lasers at the eye. It’s really good weekend. mean, these guys were having fun. I want to join this lab. So it’s like this micro dose of lasers so that they could control what you’re seeing. And in this case, do such a funky pattern of activation that you’re seeing something that would never happen in nature because that’s never how our eyes get activated.

Shane Hewitt (04:59.928)
Now, I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but if ever you wanted to fool a bunch of people, you could say, hey, here’s an experiment, but the only people that can see it were the people that we poked and prodded. Did they describe what Olo looks like?

They did. So they had a bunch of ways to quantify it based on basically colour matching experiments, trying to get people to match. It looks like this, it looks like this. And then they qualitatively asked like, what does it look like to you? What’s the closest colour you can describe? And they said the most saturated greenish blue you’ve ever seen. So kind of like a peacock blue, but way more intense and saturated.

In they had to dilute it down with so much white light just to get it even close to colour matching the teal that we might be used to seeing.

That’s just cool stuff,

Wild, I know, it’s wild.

Shane Hewitt (05:58.072)
Like what, what, I understand curiosity is such an important part of this, but really, what did you do on the weekend that made these scientists go, I know what we’re going to do, right?

It was this guy wondering the same thing. He’s quoted in an article saying the same thing you did. It’s just why can’t we see a new colour? Like, what if we just did things in a new way and just activated these cells? And in fact, two of the senior scientists who led the study, were participants because I think they just wanted to see what it would look like. I’m ready to. And then some people weren’t in the lab. So, you know, it’s not a total conflict of interest here.

I would want to be, yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:38.08)
And they did all this fancy math to show like, no, this is something that doesn’t match up with any other colour. We could possibly use any laser. Like the wild thing is they were just using a green laser, like the regular kind of green laser pointer you’re used to. And it was just the way that they made it, the way that they made it activate only certain cells in the eye, that same green laser was perceived totally differently just because of that pattern.

Yeah. So it is. It is. It is so incredibly cool. Is this where science like I don’t want to make like bad science, but like, this the good science? Because it really does leave you with more questions, right? I mean, these people have obviously answered some things, but the reality is, is that this really does leave you with more questions and everything I’ve ever learned from my scientist friends is when you can go into something like this, you can measure it, you can repeat it, and you can actually get measurable, tangible results.

but it leaves you with more questions than you started, it’s probably a win.

Yeah, more questions is always a sign of good science, in my opinion. And it was robust. They studied it in five people. They had it repeating. it wasn’t just like, wouldn’t this be cool? It has actual, the tool that they built to do this has real applications to studying eye diseases. They’re going to try to see if they can use it to help people with colour blindness see colours that they can’t otherwise see.

And the general tool that they’re using, the general technology, is already being used by some ophthalmologists to study diseases of the back of the eye, the retina. So it’s cool and it’s fun for us because we like to think of the new colour, but it has real world applications that are fundamental to us understanding vision and also our brain and how it understands stuff. Our brain is okay with just a new colour it’s never seen before. How’s that working? There’s so many more things we got to explore.

Shane Hewitt (08:33.357)
So many more things and you bring up those those image maps for colourblind tests where the green and the blue get so blurry and people can’t discern between them What if they could change that and all of sudden people could not be colourblind now. They mean that sounds Fantastic. Okay, so they’ve discovered a new colour. They’ve called it Ollo It was sort of on that they sort of did the back door for it, which is kind of cool Samantha you mean I appreciate you bringing the passion

Thanks so much for letting me chat about this super cool science.

It is super cool science. We love it.