Skip to main content

The code that may treat blindness




Neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg has found a technique that promises to treat blindness, and it all began with her idea to crack the brain’s visual code…
A stream of light from the words and pictures is bouncing into the eyeball and falling onto photoreceptor cells on the retina. This visual information is passed on to output cells and then transmitted to the brain as a kind of code, where it is reconstructed to make up the letters in this sentence you are reading right now.
Degenerative eye diseases, however, can wreak havoc on this process, says neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg of Weill Medical College at Cornell University. When they damage the retina, the image in front of you never gets further than the eyeball; the chain is broken.
That’s what makes the technology that Nirenberg has built rather remarkable. She has found a way to transmit a visual code directly to the brain, bypassing damaged cells in the eye. In other words, she can help the blind see again.
In the video above, she explains how her technology works and the eureka moment that started it all.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10 Best Places to Visit in Spain

Splendid beaches, delicious cuisine, vibrant nightlife and lively fiestas all make Spain one of Europe’s best getaways. Because Spain encompasses several autonomous regions and islands, the country boasts one of the most widely diverse cultures and landscapes on the continent. Here’s a look at the top places to visit in Spain.
1 comment
Read more

Coronavirus tests: how they work and what they show

There's a lot of talk about coronavirus testing at the moment, but some people are getting confused about what they actually are. How is the antibody test different to the PCR antigen test? What do they do? And why are they important? Josh Toussaint-Strauss speaks with Professor David Smith to answer some of these covid-19 questions.
2 comments
Read more

YELLOWSTONE SUPER VOLCANO

What is a super volcano? A super volcano is the most destructive force on this planet. Only a few exist in the world and when they erupt they do so with a force tens of thousands of times greater than other eruptions. They lie dormant for hundreds of thousands of years as a vast reservoir of magma builds up inside them before finally they unleash their apocalyptic force, capable of obliterating continents. They threaten the survival of mankind. What happened during the last eruption of a super volcano? The last eruption of a super volcano was in Toba, Sumatra, 75,000 years ago. It had 10,000 times the explosive force of Mount St. Helens and changed life on Earth forever. Thousands of cubic kilometres of ash was thrown into the atmosphere - so much that it blocked out light from the sun all over the world. 2,500 miles away 35 centimetres of ash coated the ground. Global temperatures plummeted by 21 degrees. The rain would have been so poisoned by the gasses that it would have turned bla...
Post a Comment
Read more