An experiment originally designed to test the visual abilities of octopuses and cuttlefish has given University of Bristol researchers an unprecedented insight into the human ability to perceive polarized light \u2013 the super sense that most of us don\u2019t even know we have.\u00a0We are all familiar with colour and brightness, but there is a third property of light, the \u2018polarization\u2019, which tells us the orientation in which the light waves are oscillating.\u00a0Dr Shelby Temple,\u00a0a Research Associate from the\u00a0Ecology of Vision Group\u00a0in Bristol\u2019s\u00a0School of Biological Sciences\u00a0and one of the study\u2019s lead authors said: \u201cImagine a skipping rope represents a light wave travelling through space. \u00a0If you move the rope from side to side, the wave you make is horizontally polarized. \u00a0If you shake the rope up and down you create a vertically polarized wave. Generally, light is a mixture of polarizations, but sometimes \u2013 for example in parts of the sky, on your computer screen and in reflections from water or glass \u2013 a large percentage of the waves are oscillating in the same orientation and the light is strongly polarized.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-463644","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n