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Thankfully, the Anomalocaris is extinct, because there's no hiding from this Cambrian superpredator. Scientists examinning the 515-million-year-old fossil of this unusual animal discovered that it has upwards of 16,000 eyes:
It takes a microscope to see them, but individual lenses were preserved in each eye. For someone who has seen countless images of the compound eyes of Drosophila, they are startling in how modern they look. Based on their density, the authors estimate that each eye housed 16,000 individual lenses, the most that have ever been seen on any animal we know about. Based on the curve of the eye and what we know about modern compound eyes, they suggest that the animal had very good visual acuity.
Updated Link - Thanks Eric!
Previously on Neatorama: Strangest Dinosaur Names
I read about a study that found people are less likely to steal things if they feel they are being watched -even if it’s just a photograph of someone looking at them. If that’s the case, no one would dare open a box that sports an eye stalk! Artist Angela Rose made this box and many more with an eye in each, which will discourage anyone from pilfering the contents. See the entire selection at Necropolis Studios. Link -Thanks, Stuart!
Eye Clock – $34.95
Do you have trouble telling time? Well, this adorable Eye Clock from the NeatoShop is not for you! This super fun Eye Clock is only for people who are actually proficient at telling time.
We are sorry that you suck at telling time. Maybe you just need more practice. Please don’t be sad. No one is good at everything. Everyone know that telling time can be pretty tricky.
Be sure to check out all the awesome Clocks & Timers available at the NeatoShop! Many of the Clocks & Timers are surprisingly simple to read.
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That’s a tiny sea mollusk called a chiton, that lives about 50 feet below the water’s surface. It’s a pretty darned weird animal, but scientists have found something that makes it even more remarkable: it has eyes made of rocks.
"Turns out they can see objects, though probably not well," said study researcher Daniel Speiser, who recently became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. [...]
The team realized in a lab experiment that the animal’s lenses were made of aragonite (calcium carbonate), rather than proteins like other biological lenses.
Scientists from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan cultivated embryonic stem cells in a test tube and added proteins to coax them into developing. They had wanted it to form a recognizable organ, but were stunned to find that over 10 days, the stem cells had formed an embryonic eye:
Professor Yoshiki Sasai, lead author said: "What we’ve been able to do in this study is resolve a nearly century-old problem in embryology, by showing that retinal precursors have the inherent ability to give rise to the complex structure of the optic cup."
His team, who filmed the technique as it unfolded, grew floating clusters of the mouse cells in a special tissue culture in the laboratory that had previously been successfully used to make a variety of brain cells.
By adding particular proteins they were able to get the cells to build a three dimensional layered structure reminiscent of the optic cup within 10 days.
Link – via TWYWKIWDBI
Comments Off The uncanny valley is about to get creepier, thanks to this realistic-looking animatronic eye developed by Dan Thomson of Visionary Effects. Will this be used for movie effects, Disneyland presidents, artificial girlfriends, or working robots? Maybe all of those things! -via Laughing Squid
What do you get when you add Kinect to a Pufferfish spherical display (yes, that giant orb you see above)? Behold the creepy eye that follows you everywhere:
The orb-shaped display has a big iris and retina on it and makes the rough display look like a giant eyeball sitting there on the podium. The Kinect sees when a person walks up and the eye pops up on the sphere and then follows the person as they walk around the room.
Technabob has the video clip: Link
The human eye can rotate 500 degrees per second. Now a new robot eye is able to meet and exceed that ability by moving 2,500 degrees per second. German researchers led by Heinz Ulbrich at the Technical University of Munich developed this new head-mounted optical wonder:
The system, propped on a person’s head, uses a custom made eye-tracker to monitor the person’s eye movements. It then precisely reproduces those movements using a superfast actuator-driven mechanism with yaw, pitch, and roll rotation, like a human eyeball. When the real eye move, the robot eye follows suit.
When life gives you lemon, make lemonade. How about when it takes away all your hair, except for a little tuft at the back? Well, this guy sure made the best of it!
Find this, and more crazy hairstyles over at Oddee: Link
It’s a classic but tragic mistake. Irmgard Holm of Phoenix, Arizona has several eye drop medications because of cataract surgery, but what she grabbed was a bottle of superglue.
“The bottles are identical and I am not young anymore, but I am not senile,” says Holm.
She tried washing the adhesive out, but the quick-drying glue did its job and sealed her eye shut. Paramedics and hospital staff had to get it open and wash out her eye before major damage was done.
“They had to cut off the glue substance and it was all hard and in the eye, and I couldn’t even see.”
Her case is not as rare as one would hope.
The Food and Drug Administration will interview Holm later this week, and she hopes her case and the others will put pressure on glue makers to change their bottles’ shape and size.
Link -via Breakfast Links
Photo: Rachelwrites [Flickr]
If eyes are windows to the soul, I wonder what kind of tormented soul a gecko has:
Nocturnal geckos have to be able to block out the bright sun during the day while still retaining excellent night vision, which is why they have long zig-zagged pupils that can tightly constrict to let in only pinpoints of light. Interestingly, while humans cannot see colors in dim moonlight, these animals can discriminate between colors and their eyes are calculated to be almost 350 times stronger when it comes to seeing color.
Our very own Jill Harness wrote an intriguing post over at Environmental Graffiti about 10 Incredible Eyes in the Animal Kingdom: Link
Not for the squeamish. At first glance, it seems improbable and downright impossible, but inmates are actually attempting to stand out from the crowd by having ink injected into the whites of their eyes. DamnCoolPics has a bit more information on the procedure:
Because the we had trouble getting the ink under the surface (and were able to “wash” it out of the small needle incisions), we tried the second procedure, on Josh using a 29ga needle and syringe, thinning down the ink very slightly with an antibiotic eyewash. Since the goal was simply to blanket the white of the eye in color, there wasn’t a need for fine detail. The first injection was shallow and appeared to dissipate on the surface, but the second injection was at the perfect level and formed a dark bubble of ink just over the sclera (in the third picture you can see some of the ink running back out of the injection hole).
Link. (via Cynical-C)
Priya Ganapati writes in Wired that researchers at MIT are developing an eye implant that can feed visual imput past damaged cells and directly into the brain. Patients will wear a camera that downloads images into the implant:
It won’t entirely restore normal vision, say the researchers, but it will offer just enough sight to help a blind person navigate a room.[...]
Here’s how the implant works. The glasses that patients wear contains a coil that can wirelessly transmit power to receiving coils surrounding the eyeball. The eyeball holds a microchip encased in a sealed titanium case to avoid damage from water seepage. The chip receives visual information and activates electrodes that in turn fire the nerve cells that carry visual input to the brain.
Image: flickr user Orange Acid, used under Creative Commons license.
Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnologist at the University of Washington, writes that in the future, biotech innovations could lead to display screens inside contact lenses:
These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.
Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.
Link via CrunchGear
The
evolution of the eye is fascinating
stuff (in a nutshell, the eye is so complex that Creationists claim
that it couldn't possibly have evolved ... and scientists countered that
not only did the eye evolved into being, it is so useful that it did so
more than one time)
Well, add this to the mix: Margaret McFall-Ngai and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that squids can detect light through an organ other than their eyes (and if that's not cool enough, it's done through a symbiosis with luminous bacteria!):
"Until now, scientists thought that illuminating tissues in the light organ functioned exclusively for the control of the intensity and direction of light output from the organ, with no role in light perception," says McFall-Ngai. "Now we show that the E. scolopes squid has additional light-detecting tissue that is an integral component of the light organ."
The researchers demonstrated that the squid light organ has the molecular machinery to respond to light cues. Molecular analysis showed that genes that produce key visual proteins are expressed in light-organ tissues, including genes similar to those that occur in the retina. They also showed that, as in the retina, these visual proteins respond to light, producing a physiological response.
"We found that the light organ in the squid is capable of sensing light as well as emitting and controlling the intensity of luminescence," says co-author Nansi Jo Colley, SMPH professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences and of genetics.
The company Second Sight has developed a bionic eye called the Argus II. The eye uses implanted electrodes to replace a malfunctioning retina. So far, the device has been implanted in 18 patients around the world.
It uses a camera and video processor mounted on sunglasses to send captured images wirelessly to a tiny receiver on the outside of the eye.
In turn, the receiver passes on the data via a tiny cable to an array of electrodes which sit on the retina – the layer of specialised cells that normally respond to light found at the back of the eye.
When these electrodes are stimulated they send messages along the optic nerve to the brain, which is able to perceive patterns of light and dark spots corresponding to which electrodes have been stimulated.
The hope is that patients will learn to interpret the visual patterns produced into meaningful images.
The BBC followed a 73-year-old patient named Ron who received an Argus II.
“For 30 years I’ve seen absolutely nothing at all, it’s all been black, but now light is coming through. Suddenly to be able to see light again is truly wonderful.
“I can actually sort out white socks, grey socks and black socks.”
Link -via reddit
Julian Partridge of Bristol University found something peculiar about the brownsnout spookfish: they have mirrors for eyes!
Tests confirmed the fish is the first vertebrate known to have developed mirrors to focus light into its eyes, the team reports in Current Biology.
"In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes – how to make an image – using a mirror," said Professor Julian Partridge, of Bristol University, who conducted the tests.
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Jesse of Flee Alaksa likes to eat strange things. How strange? How about this: a tuna eyeball!
I was at the grocery store and I got the urge to eat something new. I looked around and I didn’t really see much until I found a food that could look back. It was only a hundred yen, which is less than a buck, so I figured I’d give it a whirl. It had a sticker on it that said that it should be cooked, but I didn’t really know how to cook it. I tried to find stuff online, but there aren’t a lot of English webpages devoted to eating fish eyes, so I just decided to boil it.
If you’re squeamish, this isn’t for you: Link – via J-Walk Blog
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Weird Gourmet Foods
British inventor Josh Silver began working on eyeglasses that can be tuned by the wearer in 1985. His goal is to bring better vision to a billion people worldwide who cannot afford, or don’t have access to, an optometrist.
Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.
The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.
Silver’s goal is to distribute a billion pairs of his adaptive glasses to poor people by 2020 (the pun in the year is intended, I’m sure). Already, 30,000 pairs have been given out in 15 countries.
“The reaction is universal,” says Major Kevin White, formerly of the US military’s humanitarian programme, who organised the distribution of thousands of pairs around the world after discovering Silver’s glasses on Google. “People put them on, and smile. They all say, ‘Look, I can read those tiny little letters.’”
Silver hopes to get the cost of manufacturing each pair down to a dollar each. Link -Thanks, Cuimhne!
(image credit: Michael Lewis)
Rob Spence of Eyeborg blog is a filmmaker that lost an eye, so naturally he decided to get an eye-cam!
Priya Ganapati of Wired Blog has the story:
Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it’s a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.
The eye he’s considering replacing is not a working one — it’s a prosthetic eye he’s worn for several years. Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.
"If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?" he asks.
Spence, who calls himself the "eyeborg guy," will not be restoring his vision. The camera won’t connect to his brain. What it will do is allow him to be a bionic man where technology fuses with
the human body to become inseparable. In effect, he will become a "little brother," someone who’s watching and recording every move of those in his field of vision.
Link | More on Rob’s blog: Eyeborg | Not squeamish? Check out the surgery video: Link [Dailymotion] – via ligress
(Photos: Steve Mann)
