Scientists Move Closer to Creating Human Eye from Stem Cells

"A breakthrough in stem cells just brought us much closer to lab-grown human eyeballs," says Popular Mechanics. "Biologists led by Kohji Nishida at Osaka University in Japan have discovered a new way to nurture and grow the many separate tissues that make up the human eyeball, and the scientists need only a small sample adult skin to build them all. Using their new method, Nishida's team can grow retinas, corneas, the eye's lens, and more. In a preliminary trial, the Japanese researchers cultured and grew sheathes of rabbit cornea—the transparent cover of the eye— that restored sight in blind rabbits born without fully-grown corneas. The research is published today in the journal Nature. Don't throw away your glasses (or eye patch) just yet, but human trials are up next." Read more.

Blinking Sends Brain "Off Line"

“New research from Japan suggests that blinking does more than stop our eyes drying out: it is an active process that causes the brain to go off-line, into a more reflective mode, before giving renewed attention,” says  Medical News Today. “Tamami Nakano of Osaka University and colleagues write about their findings in the 24 December online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, PNAS. In earlier work, where they had invited volunteers to watch Mr Bean videos, Nakano and colleagues discovered that people's eyes blink when they need to pay less attention, for instance when the video cuts to a new scene. And in another study, they found people blink when they pause while speaking, and this entrains their listeners to time their eye blinks to occur a split second later. This seems to confirm the common-sense idea that we blink at times when we'll miss the least important information. ” Read more.