Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet
This reminds me a bit of how mystics often claim to have seen colors not seen in nature. Crazy, weird, sure, but when you actually look at the rod and cone structure that gives rise to color, there's no reason to think that more of these might not exist, and indeed some animals have different receptors, famously, the mantis shrimp has 12. Color occupies that weird junction between the subjective and objective, so we don't really have a way of working out what the subjective experience of new colors would actually be.Why this reminds me of color isn't so much the weird part, but the fact that color is a continuous surface. What would adding new colors do to the color space? Does the space remain two-dimensional or do new colors start blending a third dimension into the topology? I wish those mystics had access to spectrometers in Heaven.