Vision

Your mother, despite lacking an expensive lab studying phytochemicals or a PhD (well, for most of us anyway) told you that carrots would help you see better.     And she was right, but purple carrots here and there may be even better for you because they have anthocyanins. But carrots are not the only way to go, it turns out.   New research suggests that a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids may help prevent one of the leading causes of legal blindness among the elderly. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), loss of vision in the center of the visual field (macula) due to…

Often the topic of controversy, stem cells research has once again proved itself necessary. University of Florida researchers were able to program bone marrow stem cells to repair damaged retinas in mice. The success in repairing a damaged layer of retinal cells in mice implies that blood stem cells taken from bone marrow can be programmed to restore a variety of cells and tissues, including ones involved in cardiovascular disorders such as atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease. "To our knowledge, this is the first report using targeted gene manipulation to specifically program an adult…

Nearly all species have some ability to detect light and at least three types of cells in the retina allow us to see images or distinguish between night and day. Now, researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine say they have discovered another type of cell that can sense light and contribute to vision. Reporting in Nature, the team of neuroscientists say that retinal horizontal cells, which are nerve cells once thought only to talk to neighboring nerve cells and not even to the brain, are light sensitive themselves.  Focusing their efforts on the melanopsin light sensor, which is…

A study by the University of Barcelona (UB) has analysed which facial features our brain examines to identify faces. Our brain adapts in order to obtain the maximum amount of information possible from each face and according to the study the key data for identification come from, in the first place, the eyes and then the shape of the mouth and nose. The objective of this study, undertaken by researcher Matthias S. Keil from the Basic Psychology Department of the UB and published in the prestigious US journal PLoS Computational Biology, was to ascertain which specific features the brain…

After The Dreamimg Stops.   Ever woke up with a funny, weirdor just different feeling after dreaming a certain type of dream? I can still feel some of the dreams I had years ago. I remember a dream, to me felt eveil. LIke something was in the dream with me and I could not escape it nomatter howe I tried to change it. I have Lucrid dreams many times.That was af few years ago. I remember a hummng during thios dream. I weird hum. I can sti;; hear it and feel how it made me feel. The dream was denomic.    I could feel the evil presense. Thats was not my first attack. I was…

Antonio Egas Moniz was nominated for his contribution to science , the lobotomy. He wouldn't be my first or last pick for such a prestigious honor and apparently others feel the same way. In a case of severe poetic justice, the 1949 Nobel Prize winner was shot and paralyzed by a disgruntled patient.

A toxic molecule implicated in cell damage and disease  may also be essential for bird migration, according to the University of Illinois. They propose the molecule superoxide as a key player in the mysterious process that allows birds to 'see' Earth's magnetic field.The discovery, reported this month in Biophysical Journal, occurred as a result of a "mistake" made by a collaborator, said principal investigator Klaus Schulten, who holds the Swanlund Chair in Physics at Illinois. His postdoctoral collaborator, Ilia Solov'yov, of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, did not know…

Your color vision is not for seeing red sunsets or green grass; rather, it evolved as a kind of empath sense, optimized to detect the changes in blood physiology in the skin of the faces (and rumps) of others, thereby sensing their emotions. Your forward-facing eyes are not for seeing in depth, but, rather, for significantly enhancing how much you can see in the cluttered forest habitats of your ancestors. Perceptual illusions are not errors your visual system makes in trying to make sense of three-dimensional scenes, but, instead, are due to your brain attempting to foresee the near future,…

When you are concentrating on something, neural "noise" may cause you to miss important changes in your environment, new research indicates, and this binocular rivalry which occurs when the two eyes view radically different images means the brain temporarily rejects, or suppresses, one of those images in favor of the other. The image that commands our visual awareness switches between the two over time. This fluctuation in visual awareness enables cognitive neuroscientists to study the neural correlates of awareness and consciousness. It has been known for years that the neural…

A team of researchershas discovered a biological marker for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in older adults.  The marker, a receptor known as CCR3, shows strong potential as a means for both the early detection of the disease and for preventive treatment. Neovascular (or "wet-type") macular degeneration is caused by choroidal neovascularization (CNV) – the invasive growth of new blood vessels in the thin vascular layer that provides nourishment and oxygen to the eye. Central vision loss occurs when these abnormal blood vessels invade…