A Czech man has invented special vibrating shoes to help blind people 'see' with their feet, ananova.com reported.
Antonin Kaspara's shoe has a special device in its sole that sends out a beam of infrared light.
A sensor picks up any light reflected back off potential obstacles and activates a device to make the sole vibrate to warn the walker.
He said, "It works like a bat's sonar except it uses light beams to detect rather than sound, and is really effective."
Kaspara, from Hluk, said the shoe, which runs on a battery, which needs replacing every day, could be produced using simple materials for £11.
Kaspara, who has had the shoes patented, said, "It could be on the market by next year."
Viktor Dudr, of the United Organisation for the Blind and Partially-Sighted in the Czech Republic, said Kaspara had surpassed the efforts of British scientists with millions of pounds at their disposal.
"The blind can currently use some devices which alert them when there's an obstacle but to be able to register the signal, they must wear headphones and that's a handicap because hearing is extremely important for the blind," he said.

Fast-light and slow-light curves compared to the reference pulse, whose center is marked by the dashed vertical line. The solid vertical line marks the position of the summit of a pulse that would have traveled at speed c. The fast pulse shows superluminal group velocity.

Physicists in Switzerland have confirmed that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva have shown that the "group velocity" of a laser pulse in an optical fiber can travel faster than the speed of light but that the "signal velocity"--the speed at which information travels--cannot.
According to PhysicsWeb.org, two types of velocity are used to describe the propagation of a wave in a dispersive medium: the phase velocity and the group velocity. The phase velocity is the speed at which light of a single wavelength moves.
However, pulses of light contain a range of wavelengths, which all move at different speeds in a dispersive medium. The group velocity is the speed at which the pulse moves. In particular, the energy travels at the group velocity rather than the phase velocity.
In recent years, physicists have shown that both these velocities can exceed the speed of light in certain
situations without breaking the laws of special relativity.
This means, therefore, that neither the group nor the phase velocity can be used to describe the speed at which the information in the pulse travels, and we need to define it by another velocity--the "signal velocity".
This is defined as the speed at which the "front" of the pulse travels. According to relativity, this speed can never exceed the speed of light in a vacuum because, if it did, it would be equivalent to sending the signal backwards in time, which would violate causality.
In their experiment, Gisin and colleagues sent a pulse of polarized photons into an optical fiber that was sandwiched between an input and an output polarizer. The fiber is birefringent, which means that it splits the pulse into two pulses that are orthogonally polarized to each other. By carefully choosing the correct input and output polarizations, the Geneva team found that it could obtain constructive interference for photons at the front of the pulse and destructive interference for photons at the rear.
Gisin and colleagues plotted counts against the time-of-arrival of the photons. Using this graph, they calculated a mean group velocity that was 1.76 times the speed of light in vacuum. More importantly, they measured the signal velocity for the first time and showed that the increase in the group velocity does not increase the speed at which information
travels.

Researchers say they have found the most effective treatment for people suffering from a bad back, BBC News Online said.
The Medical Research Council team said chiropractic, osteopathy or manipulative physiotherapy--plus an exercise program was most effective.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, they say this three-pronged approach provides significant symptom relief.
They hope their findings will clarify how to treat back pain--one of the most common conditions seen by GPs.
More than 1,300 patients whose back pain had not improved through the "first line" advice of keeping active and not taking bed rest.
They filled in questionnaires on their general health, back pain, beliefs and psychological well-being before being randomly assigned to a treatment. Further questionnaires were completed after one, three and 12 months.
Patients were allocated a class-based physical exercise program overseen by a physiotherapist, one form of spinal manipulation (such as physio), or a combination of the two.
People in all groups saw some improvement in their back function.
Those assigned to exercise classes in addition to GP care reported a small benefit at three months but not at one year.
Spinal manipulation plus GP care was linked to a small to moderate benefit at three months and a small, on average, benefit at one year.
But the biggest improvement was seen in those patients assigned to combined manipulation and exercise in addition to GP care.
They reported a moderate, on average, improvement at three months and a smaller average improvement at one year.

Cocaine addicts have a smaller amygdala--a brain structure that helps people judge the consequences of their actions--than non-addicted people, claims the research, Psycport.com said.
"These observations are relevant, because cocaine-dependent subjects have significant difficulty identifying the potential negative outcomes of their behavior or acknowledging that these outcomes could transpire," the researchers noted.
Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the investigators scanned the brains of 27 cocaine addicts and 27 non-addicts. They found the amygdalas of the cocaine addicts were an average 13 percent smaller on the left side of the brain, and 23 percent smaller on the right side of the brain, compared to the amygdalas of the non-addicts.
The investigators couldn't determine conclusively whether cocaine addiction results in a smaller amygdala, or whether people with smaller amygdalas are more likely to become addicts. However, they believe the findings indicate that reduced amygdala volume may occur before the onset of addiction.