. . . just links from HayYoo.com and DanKostecki.com
Off with their heads. Light-averse planarian flatworms, known for their incredible ability to regenerate lost body parts, shy away from light even after they have been decapitated. This suggests they have evolved a second way to respond to light that doesn’t involve eyes.
There’s some evidence that people with a greater degree of openness also have better visual awareness. For example, when focusing on letters moving on a screen, they are more likely to notice a grey square appearing elsewhere on the display.
Now Anna Antinori at the University of Melbourne in Australia and her team are showing that people who score more highly when it comes to the openness trait “see” more possibilities. “They seem to have a more flexible gate for the visual information that breaks through into their consciousness,” Antinori says.
Here is a simple online test for color vision. I don’t know if it is accurate, or if the the science behind it is correct, but it only takes a few minutes and it is game-like. I got 27 with 0 errors, so I’m hawk eyed – beat that!
Injections of a recently discovered chemical into the eyes of blind lab mice has restored at least part of the rodents’ vision. The chemical, called AAQ — short for acrylamide-azobenzene-quaternary ammonium — was not tested in humans, nor is it a cure for blindness. But researchers who treated mice with the molecule, a type of light-sensitive “photoswitch,” think their method represents an advance in the quest to help the blind see. “The photoswitch is injected into the vitreous cavity of the eye, but unlike the other strategies, it does not require highly invasive surgical interventions and its actions are reversible,” the authors of a new study about AAQ wrote July 26 study in Neuron. “This is a major advance in the field of vision restoration,” said opthamologist Dr. Russell Van Gelder at the University of Washington, Seattle, a co-author of the study. In a healthy eye, light strikes rod- and cone-shaped photoreceptor cells lining the retina, which transmit the signal into a network of nerves below them. Those nerves ultimately usher visual information to the brain. Retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration kill off the rods and cones, eventually causing blindness, but the network of nerves behind often remains intact. By taking advantage of the intact nerves, a few biomedical tricks can already partially restore vision. Electronic sensors implanted in a retina, for example, can stimulate the nerves to send visual information when struck by light. Likewise, engineered viruses can implant genes into retinal nerve cells that make them react to light.
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