6 - Kuwait Oil Company

Hi-Tech
Bionic Eye
Becomes
a Reality
Regulators have approved a bionic eye for the first time in the U.S., saying Second
Sight Medical Products Inc.'s retinal prosthesis can be used to treat a certain kind of
blindness. The Argus II sends electrical stimulation to the retina to induce vision in
individuals afflicted with retinitis pigmentosa. This disorder, which can run in families,
damages and kills the cells in the retina - a tissue layer at the back of the eye - that
process light. The disease causes vision to become increasingly blurry until they can't
see at all. Around 100,000 patients in the U.S. have the condition. The Argus II,
which is already available in Europe, can't restore sight completely, but it can improve
vision in individuals who can see almost nothing. The device works by bypassing
the damaged cells that process light. Video cameras mounted on glasses capture
the visual information in the form of light; the data are then transmitted wirelessly to
the implant to trigger electrodes in the chip to stimulate pixels of light on the retina.
This information is then sent to the brain and processed normally as an image.
Scientists
Unveil New
Detectors
to Protect
Against
Asteroids
In projects backed by NASA as well as proposals put forward by private space
contractors, scientists want to develop techniques that can pinpoint relatively small
but still potentially devastating meteoroids, comets and asteroids that threaten to
strike Earth. These would give notice of impact of several days or possibly weeks and
allow threatened areas to be evacuated. Astronomers believe they have pinpointed
all large asteroids whose orbits bring them close to Earth. To date, none has been
found on a collision course with our planet. However, small asteroids only a few dozen
meters across are very difficult to spot but massive enough to cause local devastation.
Had the time of entry of the Chelyabinsk meteorite into the atmosphere varied by
only a few hours; its path would have brought it down over much larger population
centers in northern England; hence the pressure from astronomers to develop ways
to pinpoint small objects in space. Russia's Academy of Sciences said the object that
struck Chelyabinsk weighed about 10 tons. It was probably part of a larger meteorite
that had entered the atmosphere at about 30km per second before breaking up.
The energy it released was comparable with a small nuclear bomb exploding.
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April - June 2013