At the University of Cambridge in England, British scientists have printed eye cells. Yes, that’s right, printed. These scientists were able to make two types of eye cells from rats. The next step is to attempt to make a photoreceptor cell that will translate light into signals that are understood by the brain. This type of research will hopefully lead to a cure for many forms of blindness, specifically those that are the result of diseases which cause loss of nerve cells.
I am constantly and pleasantly surprised by the new advances in medical technology.
New research from Oregon Health and Science University suggests that alcohol, when consumed in moderation, can actually increase your immune system. While several other studies have demonstrated other benefits of moderate drinking, this is the first to show the effects on the immune system. Alcohol was made free available to monkeys, and just like people they drank in various amounts. At various times during the fourteen month study the monkeys were given vaccinations and those monkeys who had an average blood alcohol content of 0.02-0.04 had a higher immune response to the vaccination. Not surprising however is that monkeys with a blood alcohol of 0.08, the legal limit in humans for driving, showed a significant decrease in immune response.
With fourteen months of drunken monkeys, where are all the YouTube videos?
Wired provides us with a really informative and interesting opinion piece from Thad Starner, a lead working on Google Glass. Starner has been working on wearable technology since the mid 90’s and some of his goals with Google Glass are quite surprising. The most interesting to me was the fact that this kind of technology is actually designed to increase human to human interaction. The idea is to make the technology more rapidly available in order to reduce the interference that comes from using the technology. It takes on average twenty seconds for someone to pull out their phone and unlock it before they can even look at whatever it is they pulled the phone out for in the first place. Google Glass aims to reduce this to just a couple seconds. They’ve also designed the display to be out of a persons normal eye line so that it won’t interfere with people look at one another.
Now I really want to give Google Glass a test drive.
Therefore I Geek 