Teaching Skiing to the Blind and Visually Impaired

The United States Association of Blind Athletes (USABA) and the Beaver Run Resort and Conference Center are teaching alpine skiing and Nordic skiing to blind and visually impaired teens and adults, including veterans and active duty service members. The annual USABA camp began yesterday at the resort and the Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center, which will provide trained ski guides. The program has been supported by Anthem Life Insurance Company. United States Marine Corp veteran Richard Hunter, the conference's guest speaker, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa. He has not let the complications from the disease define him. He is a four-time Boston Marathon Age Group Qualifier. He is ranked as the third fastest visually impaired person in North America to participate in the 70.3 Ironman distance. He is the second visually impaired person to complete the full Ironman in less than 12 hours. And, he completed the 2014 Sharkfest Alcatraz Swim and the 2013 American River 50 Mile Endurance Run. In addition, he was just selected as the 2014 Road Runners Club of America’s Outstanding Challenged Athlete Award recipient. Read more.

Hubel, half the Nobel Prize Winning Team to Discover Retina's Role with the Brain, Dies

Wiesel and Hubel celebrating their Nobel prize in 1981.

"Dr. David Hubel, who was half of an enduring scientific team that won a Nobel Prize for explaining how the brain assembles information from the eye’s retina to produce detailed visual images of the world, died on Sunday in Lincoln, Mass. He was 87," reports the New York Times. "Dr. Hubel and Dr. [Torsten] Wiesel liked to recall that their initial discovery about how vision works resulted from luck. Working in a tiny basement laboratory at Johns Hopkins, the pair struggled for days to coax brain cells in cats to respond to images of dark and light spots. Becoming increasingly frustrated, they waved their arms, jumped around, and, in a moment of levity, displayed images of glamorous women from magazines. Then, as they shifted a slide in the opthalmoscope, a cell in the cat’s visual cortex suddenly started to fire. The edge of the slide had cast a straight, dark line on the animal’s retina. “It was what the cell wanted, and it wanted it, moreover, in just one narrow range of orientations,” Dr. Hubel said in his Nobel lecture. They studied the cell for nine hours, and then, Dr. Wiesel recalled, ran down the hall screaming with joy." Read more.

OneSight & BC/BS Help in Indianapolis

Some 225 Hundreds of Indianapolis-area students will receive comprehensive vision exams and new eyewear free of charge this week at Vision Van Clinics thanks to a collaboration between Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation and OneSight, a leading charity dedicated to providing sustainable access to quality vision care, eyewear and sun protection to those in need around the world. Since 1995, the van’s clinics have provided eye exams and eyewear to more than 13,000 children throughout Indiana.  Read more.

Some States Struggle Setting Up Insurance Exchanges

"The days since President Obama won re-election have been marked by tension and angst in Republican-led states like Iowa, where Gov. Terry Branstad has waited until the last minute to decide whether to create a crucial tool for people to get medical coverage under Mr. Obama’s health care law," according to the New York Times. "'There has been a total blackout of information,' said State Senator Jack Hatch, a Democrat who vented his frustration at a news conference here this week. 'We’re behind schedule, we’re at a disadvantage, and I don’t know what our governor’s plan is to reposition Iowa.' States are supposed to tell the Obama administration by Friday whether they want to create their own health insurance exchange — a deadline that many had bet might never come to pass, choosing to sit on their hands for months in the hope that Mitt Romney would win the presidency and the health care law would be repealed." Read more.

Olympian Archer Can't See Target Clearly

"The target sits 70 meters away, three-quarters of the length of a football field. Ten concentric circles telescope from white to black to blue to red to gold in a bull’s-eye the size of a grapefruit," reports the New York Times. "For Im Dong-hyun of South Korea, considered by many the world’s greatest archer, the colors appear blurry. He described them Saturday as paint dropped in water. " Read more.