A Chinese Boy has Blue Cat Eyes with Night Vision

His eyes flash neon green when illuminated by a flashlight, and his night vision is good enough to enable him to fill out questionnaires while sitting in a pitch black room, as reported by reporters who visited Nong in his hometown of Dahua 3 years ago.

The footage of Nong and his unique eyes originally surfaced in 2009, it got little attention at the time, but now is making splash all over the Web.

If the boy really does have a genetic mutation that confers night vision, then he would be an interesting subject for analysis by vision scientists, evolutionary biologists, and genetic engineers.

The experts say Nong does have unusually colored irises considering his ethnicity, but he’s not the next step in human evolution.

Night vision is made possible by a layer of cells called as the tapetum lucidum, in the eyes of cats and other nocturnal animals. This thin layer is a “retroreflector”, when a beam of light hits it, it reflects the light directly back along its incoming path.

The reflected beam constructively interferes with the incoming light beam, amplifying the overall signal that hits the retina and enabling the animal to see in very low-light conditions. Retroreflection also causes cat eyes to flash when they are lit upon at night, and experts say Nong’s eyes, if they are truly catlike, should do the same. [Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See]

“It would be easy to test the boy’s eyes for retroreflection (eyeshine), which would be indicative of a tapetum lucidum,” said Nathaniel Greene, a physicist at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania who has studied retroreflection.
In fact, such a test is run in the video. Watch it below: