Researchers have discovered the first known biological occurrence of a potentially new state of matter known as “disordered hyperuniformity” in the cells in a chicken’s eye.
Could this be simliar to how Visual Snow reacts in the eyes of a human?
Unlike chickens, visual cells are evenly distributed in an obvious pattern in many creatures’ eyes. The Washington University researchers thought the unusual arrangement in chickens (left) had to do with how the cones are packed into their small, thin retina. The Princeton researchers developed a computer-simulation model that mimicked the final arrangement of chicken cones (right). The colored dots represent the centers of the chicken’s eye cells. They are enlarged and colored for visualization purposes. (Courtesy of Salvatore Torquato, Princeton University)
It turned out that each type of cone has an area around it called an “exclusion region” that other cones cannot enter. Cones of the same type shut out each other more than they do unlike cones, and this variant exclusion causes distinctive cone patterns. Each type of cone’s pattern overlays the pattern of another cone so that the formations are intertwined in an organized but disordered way — a kind of uniform disarray. So, while it appeared that the cones were irregularly placed, their distribution was actually uniform over large distances. That’s disordered hyperuniformity, Torquato said.
