COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A team of University of Maryland bioengineering researchers have developed a microscopy technique that could one day be used to improve LASIK and eliminate the “surgery” aspect of the procedure. Their findings were published in Physical Review Letters. (more…)
Your eye could someday house its own high-tech information center, tracking important changes and letting you know when it’s time to see an eye doctor.
University of Washington engineers have designed a low-power sensor that could be placed permanently in a person’s eye to track hard-to-measure changes in eye pressure. The sensor would be embedded with an artificial lens during cataract surgery and would detect pressure changes instantaneously, then transmit the data wirelessly using radio frequency waves. (more…)
Along with eggs, soup and rubber toys, the list of the chicken’s most lasting legacies may eventually include advanced materials such as self-organizing colloids, or optics that can transmit light with the efficiency of a crystal and the flexibility of a liquid.
The unusual arrangement of cells in a chicken’s eye constitutes the first known biological occurrence of a potentially new state of matter known as “disordered hyperuniformity,” according to researchers from Princeton University and Washington University in St. Louis. Research in the past decade has shown that disordered hyperuniform materials have unique properties when it comes to transmitting and controlling light waves, the researchers report in the journal Physical Review E. (more…)
UCLA anthropologists study how, why we read into potential peril
They went boating alone without life vests and gave no thought to shimmying up very tall coconut trees.
And although they were only figments of a writer’s imagination, the fictional adventurers helped provide new insight into how humans, especially men, gauge the threat of a potential adversary. Those reading the stories — dozens of residents of a small village on the Fijian island of Yasawa — judged the characters to be risk-seekers. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north pole.
In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph(150 meters per second). The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon. (more…)
For 10 years, it has silently swooped through space in its orbital perch 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth, its nearly 2,400 spectral “eyes” peering into Earth’s atmosphere, watching. But there’s nothing alien about NASA’s Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, or AIRS, instrument, a “monster” of weather and climate research that celebrates its 10th birthday in orbit May 4.
AIRS, built by BAE Systems, Boston, under the direction of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., is one of six instruments flying on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft as part of NASA’s Earth Observing System. AIRS, along with its partner microwave instrument, the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A), has faithfully measured our planet’s atmospheric temperature, water vapor, clouds and greenhouse gases with unprecedented accuracy and stability. Over the past decade, AIRS and AMSU-A have improved our understanding of Earth’s global water and energy cycles, climate change and trends and how Earth’s climate system is responding to increased greenhouse gases. (more…)
*Wolfgang Fink’s research into artificial retinas helps restore some sight in blind patients with age-related macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa.*
University of Arizona College of Engineering professor Wolfgang Fink has been elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Fink is an associate professor in the UA department of electrical and computer engineering, where he is the founding director of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory and holds the Edward and Maria Keonjian Endowed Chair. Fink also has joint appointments in the departments of biomedical engineering, systems and industrial engineering, and ophthalmology and vision science. (more…)
