How does our brain organize thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? That’s the question that scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, sought to answer by creating the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings. 

 

The result is what researchers are calling “a continuous semantic space.” Up to now, the scientific community thought that each category of object or action humans see (people, animals, vehicles, movements) is represented in a separate region of the visual cortex. The study by the Berkeley team, however, shows that these categories are actually represented in highly organized, overlapping maps that cover almost 20% of the brain, including the somatosensory and frontal cortices.

 

A clearer understanding of how the brain organizes visual input could help with the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. It could also help create brain-machine interfaces.

“Our discovery suggests that brain scans could soon be used to label an image that someone is seeing, and may also help teach computers how to better recognize images,” said doctoral student Alexander Huth.

 

Source: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/12/19/semanticspace

A researcher in ophthalmology and neuroscience at the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans Neuroscience Center of Excellence has discovered a protein that protects retinal photoreceptor cells from degeneration caused by light damage.

 

The protein, called FATP4 (for fatty acid transport protein) could become the target of new treatments for retinal degenerative disease or age-related macular degeneration, according to the article published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

 

The researchers were trying to understand what could impede the proper functioning of the RPE65 enzyme, the mutations of which have been linked to various kinds of vision loss, retinal degeneration, and blinding eye diseases. They found that the FATP4 protein was inhibiting RPE65.

 

Recently, mutations in the human FATP4 gene have been identified in patients with a certain recessive disorder which also features one of the toxic by-products associated with abnormal visual cycles. This by-product, called A2E, accumulates in retinal pigment epithelial cells with age. This means additional studies are needed to determine whether the FATP4 mutations cause age-related disorders and retinal degeneration.

 

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130212172207.htm

Google recently found yet another way to tweak the curiosity of technophiles, by unveiling a new video introducing its new “smart” glasses called Google Glass. The video also offers a contest giving people the “right” to purchase (rather than the chance to win…) a Glass device before it becomes widely available to the public.

 

The new video puts us in the place of the wearer, to show us what we would see if we were wearing the glasses. The wearer can apparently give the device voice commands, such as take pictures or film a video of what the wearer is seeing. The product of the operation is visible in a small box with transparent grey background, in which text, pictures, and videos are displayed by the glasses.

 

The video and pictures also available on the Google site suggest a number of usage possibilities for the new device, which are all along the same lines: have a smart-phone-like device attached to our glasses. The Google Glass seems to be intended to offer a new platform for applications already available on smart phones and tablets, such as GPS, text messaging, Internet, telephone services, and videoconferencing.

 

Click on the following link to view the video:

http://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/02/20/google-glass_n_2724246.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

 

Sources:

http://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/02/20/google-glass_n_2724246.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/

Discoveries by scientists at Monash University, in Australia, have brought us closer to a treatment for congenital eye conditions caused by damage to the lens.

 

Associate Professor Tiziano Berberi and Dr. Isabella Mengarelli are working to grow parts of the human eye in the lab. They took an important step when they derived and purified lens epithelium. The purity of the cells paves the way for future applications in regenerative medicine.

 

The researchers didn’t stop there. They caused these epithelial cells to differentiate further into lens cells, providing a platform to test new drugs on human tissue in the lab.

 

“The lens has, to some extent, the ability to heal well following surgical intervention,” explains Professor Barberi. “However, with congenital cataracts, the fault is wired into the DNA, so the lens will re-grow with the original impairment.”      

                                                 

They still have their work cut out for them. “The lens cells that we created in the petri dish are organized differently to those in a human eye, admits the professor. The next challenge is mimicking nature more perfectly.”

 

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130131095232.htm

 

Nearsightedness may progress faster in children during winter, due to reduced exposure to daylight, than during summer.

 

That’s what researchers suggest in a new study involving 200 children aged 8 to 14 with nearsightedness in Denmark. Their findings were published in the journal Ophthalmology. The researchers studied both the children’s vision and the shape of their eyes.

 

In Denmark, a winter day lasts seven hours, whereas a summer day is almost 18 hours. Over the six months with the least daylight, nearsightedness progressed by 0.32 diopters, compared to 0.28 diopters over the sunniest months. During the winter, eye length of participants increased by 0.18 mm, compared to 0.14 mm over the summer.

 

The researchers did not analyze the exact number of hours that the children spent outdoors, but calculated the average time spent outdoors based on the season. Given that temperatures are very cold, Danish children, like those in Canada, spend much less time outdoors in winter than they do in summer.

Source:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/11/us-nearsighted-idUSBRE91A12E20130211