Home

On:

"Three Blind Mice" is an old children’s tune, but a team of scientists have taken it seriously: they discovered a chemical that temporarily restores some vision to blind mice. This could someday allow people with degenerative blindness to see again.

Because the chemical eventually wears off, it may offer a safer alternative to other experimental approaches for restoring sight, such as gene or stem cell therapies, which permanently change the retina.
read more

On:

The force of a champagne cork can shatter glass–and it can also seriously injure your eye.

Warm bottles of champagne and improper cork-removal techniques cause serious, potentially blinding eye injuries each year. Champagne bottles contain pressure as high as 90 pounds per square inch–more than the pressure found inside a typical car tire. This pressure can launch a champagne cork at 50 miles per hour as it leaves the bottle.

Champagne cork mishaps can lead to a variety of serious eye injuries, including rupture of the eye wall, acute glaucoma, retinal detachment, ocular bleeding, dislocation of the lens, and damage to the eye’s bone structure. These injuries sometimes require urgent eye surgeries, and can even lead to blindness in the affected eye. read more

On:

Anne Strieber learned that we use a specific part of the brain to tell time. A new study finds that the part of the brain we use for reading doesn’t require vision at all: Brain imaging studies of blind people as they read words in Braille show activity in the same part of the brain that lights up when sighted readers read.read more

On:

“Blindsight” is the ability that some blind people have to sense things that they can’t see. Here’s something amazing: One blind man, known only as “TN,” proved that he can find his way around obstacles in his way, even though he is totally blind. He can also “sense” emotions such as fear, anger and joy in other people, even though he can’t see their faces. This is one of the subjects she discusses with Russell Targ, who is legally blind, on Dreamland. Come talk to Anne in person in Nashville in June!
read more