A permanent eye implant is currently undergoing clinical trials and could come into general use in two to three years' time.

Sensors can monitor production processes, unmask tiny cracks in aircraft hulls, and determine the amount of laundry in a washing machine. In future, they will also be used in the human body and raise the alarm in the event of high pressure in the eye, bladder or brain.
If the pressure in the eye is too high, nerve fibers die, resulting in visual field loss or blindness. Since increased intraocular pressure, also known as glaucoma, is not usually painful, the condition is often diagnosed too late, according to Science Daily.
Moreover, such patients often tend to develop cataracts when they get older--the lenses of their eyes become opaque. In such cases, surgeons remove the natural lens and replace it with an artificial one.
To avoid further loss of nerve fibers, the intraocular pressure is then regulated as accurately as possible with the help of medication. Unfortunately, the pressure continues to vary despite medication, obligating the patient to have it constantly monitored by physicians and the medication dosage adjusted accordingly.
In future, a sensor developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectric Circuits and Systems IMS in Duisburg will obviate the need for constant visits to the physician by such patients. “We integrate the 2.5 by 2.6 millimeter sensor in the artificial lens,“ says Thomas van den Boom, group manager for biohybrid systems at the IMS. “This doesn’t impair the patient’s vision.“ The top and bottom of the sensor are formed by electrodes; the top electrode is flexible, in contrast to its rigid counterpart on the bottom of the sensor.
When the intraocular pressure increases, the top electrode is pushed in, reducing the distance between the top and bottom of the sensor and thus increasing the capacitance. Using a tiny antenna, the implant then sends the pressure data to a reader that is fitted into the frame of a pair of spectacles. The patient can view the results on an auxiliary device and determine whether the pressure has reached a critical level. An antenna in the spectacle frame supplies the sensor with the required energy via an electromagnetic field. “The power consumption of the sensor must be kept to an absolute minimum,“ explains van den Boom. “All unused components are put in a kind of standby mode and only activated when needed.“

A little dirt never hurt. But in today’s super-clean world, vaccinations, anti-bacterial soaps, and airtight doors and windows are keeping dirt and disease-causing germs at bay.
While staying germ-free can prevent the spread of disease and infections, leading a cleanlier lifestyle may be responsible for an increase in allergies among children.
“It’s called the hygiene hypothesis,“ says Marc McMorris, M.D., a pediatric allergist at the University of Michigan Health System. “We’ve developed a cleanlier lifestyle, and our bodies no longer need to fight germs as much as they did in the past. As a result, the immune system has shifted away from fighting infection to developing more allergic tendencies.“
The body’s immune system is designed to fight infection (bacterial, viral and parasites), but also recognizes foreign substances as allergens, Science Daily reported.
With the advent of vaccines, however, the immune system is no longer taxed with fighting off life-threatening diseases such as polio and measles. And thanks to antibiotics, the immune system is no longer burdened to the extent it was in the past, with fighting common bacterial infections.
Even our homes have changed how our immune system functions. Air tight doors and windows--designed to save energy--have created an increased concentration of indoor allergens.
Plus, McMorris says, today’s family is smaller, which lessens children’s exposure to germs and infections. Families with three or more children--a more common family dynamic 20 or 30 years ago--tend to have fewer allergies because more children mean more germs and greater exposure to bacteria and viruses.
“The natural immune system does not have as much to do as it did 50 years ago because we’ve increased our efforts to protect our children from dirt and germs,“ says McMorris.
“Allergies are on the rise because our society has changed the way we live. As a result, people with allergies are having children with others who have allergies, which in turn creates a natural increase in the prevalence of allergies in our society.“
Allergies are a reaction by the body’s immune system to foreign substances--pollen, mold, animal dander, dust and dust mites, insect stings and certain foods--that it deems harmful.

If you were a prehistoric human, would you prefer to able to sprint very fast for short distances? Or to jog comfortably for kilometres (miles)?
That’s one of the questions thrown up by the so-called “gene for speed,“ known as ACTN3.
According to AFP, one of the most intriguing genes discovered, ACTN3 encodes a protein that governs metabolism in “fast twitch“ muscle fibres, which generate force at high speed.
Around 18 percent of the world’s population has a truncated variant of the gene which blocks this protein. The stubby variant, called R577X, is common among successful endurance athletes, previous research has found.
On the other hand, elite sprinters, who need explosive speed, are likelier to have the reverse--a functioning variant of ACTN3.
Keen to find out more, researchers led by Kathryn North, a professor at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, in Sydney, Australia, created a batch of mice that had been engineered to lack ACTN3.
The knockout mice and ordinary mice with a functioning ACTN3 gene were put on a motorized treadmill, which spun ever faster until the luckless rodents were exhausted.
The easy winners in this endurance test were the knockout mice, which were able to run on average a third further than their counterparts.
The apparent reason for this: the loss of ACNT3’s protein was compensated by a different protein, called alpha-actinin-2, which shifted muscle metabolism towards a smoother, more efficient, aerobic pathway.
As a result, fast-twitch leg muscles could be contracted again and again, without tiring.
North’s team also looked through genetic profiles from individuals of European and East Asian descent and found that there was remarkably little sign of mutation in the wider stretch of genetic code in the vicinity of R577X.
Such similarity is a telltale sign of what evolutionary experts call positive selection. Genes which help the fight for survival get lastingly incorporated in the human genome, whereas those that encumber it get weeded out.
In other words, the ability to run longer distances became a preferential trait that became incorporated into a wide swathe of Homo sapiens.
If so, the incorporation happened recently, on the long scale of human history.
According to North’s calculations, R577X took root among populations in central Europe around 15,000 years ago and in East Asia around 33,000 years ago.
The variant has not been incorporated in all of us, either because so little time has elapsed for this to happen or is being countered by selective pressures in favor of other genes, they speculate.

The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists.
Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case.
In fact, almost 50 percent of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously, BBC said.
At the BA Festival of Science in York, the researchers also revealed that our brain can fuse two separate images to obtain a clear view of a page.
Sophisticated eye-tracking equipment allowed the team to pinpoint which letter a volunteer’s eyes focused on, when reading 14-point font from one meter away.
Rather than the eyes moving smoothly over text, they make small jerky movements, focusing on a particular word for an instant and then moving along the sentence. Periods when the eyes are still are called fixations.
Professor Simon Liversedge, from the University of Southampton, said: “We found that in a very substantial number of fixations that people make when they read, they aren’t looking at the same letter.“
Instead, the eyes often focused on different letters in the same word, about two characters apart, he said.
“They could be uncrossed, in the sense that the two lines of sight are not crossed when you look at a word, or alternatively the two lines of sight may be crossed,“ he added.
The team’s results demonstrated that both eyes lock on to the same letter 53 percent of the time; for 39 percent of the time they see different letters with uncrossed eyes; and for 8 percent of the time the eyes are crossing to focus on different letters.
A follow-up experiment with the eye-tracking equipment showed that we only see one clear image when reading because our brain fuses the different images from our eyes together.
The tests showed that we use the information from both eyes, rather than our brain suppressing one image and only processing the other.
Professor Liversedge said: “A comprehensive understanding of the psychological processes underlying reading is vital if we are to develop better methods of teaching children to read and offer remedial treatments for those with reading disorders such as dyslexia.“

Global warming may be to blame for the gradual extinction of cold-loving species, and the European land leech in particular, according to Ulrich Kutschera and colleagues from the University of Kassel in Germany and the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz in Austria.
According to Bio-medicine.org, their findings show that human-induced temperature increases over a 40-year period in the Graz region of Austria may have led to the near extinction of the local land leech Xerobdella lecomtei.
Back in 1868 a new leech was discovered in Austria, in the moist soil of a mountain far away from any freshwater pond or stream. This unusual annelid was the European land leech X. lecomtei. Between 2001 and 2005, Kutschera and team were only able to find one living juvenile Xerobdella individual in the birch forests around Graz in Austria, suggesting that this leech had become virtually extinct.
Kutschera’s team studied the single leech and described in detail both its morphology and feeding behavior, as there had previously only been one published report on the biology of Xerobdella. Once the leech died, the researchers extracted mitochondrial DNA to sequence it. Their analysis showed that X. lecomtei is not a member of the tropical land leeches (family Haemadipsidae), as previously thought, but may be a relative of the amphibious-terrestrial Haemopidae/Hirudinidae, which prefer cooler climates.
The researchers also looked at data documenting the human-induced climate change in Austria over the last four decades, which showed that between 1961 and 2004, the average summer temperatures in the area rose by over 3 OC. The observed decline in the local leech population around Graz mirrors this temperature rise. This increase in air temperature led to a drastic reduction in the moisture content of the soil where the land leech X. lecomtei lives. In the authors’ opinion, this recent human-induced warming may have led to the almost complete extinction of the local population of this rare annelid.
These findings are a reminder that the impact of humans on the environment can be more rapid and subtle than previously thought. The authors conclude that “human-induced warming without apparent habitat destruction may lead to subtle changes in biodiversity, notably the decline and extinction of populations that consist of cold-adapted species.“

A new type of packaging, pictured is a bottle of ketchup, will reduce the left-over traces by at least half.

Shaking and tapping is often the only way to get the last drop of ketchup out of the bottle. But in future, even this final drop will slide out easily onto the barbecued steak--thanks to a special coating on the packaging.
We all know the problem with ketchup or mayonnaise: No matter how we shake or tap the bottle, some of the content refuses to come out. In some cases, up to 20 percent is left in the packaging when it is dumped in the trash can. This is not only annoying for consumers, but also poses difficulties when recycling: The leftovers first have to be removed from the packaging, which is expensive, time-consuming, and use a great deal of water. If the products in question are pharmaceuticals, chemicals or pesticides, the rinsed-out leftovers also have to be disposed of in a suitable manner, Science Daily said.
A joint project by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Freising and for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart, together with Munich University of Technology and various industrial partners, sponsored by the BMBF, will put an end to this dilemma. “We are developing packaging materials that reduce left-over traces to half or less,“ says Dr. Cornelia Stramm, head of the Functional Films business field at the IVV.
The researchers apply thin films, no more than 20 nanometers thick, to the inside surface of the packaging. “We make the coatings from a plasma of the type already familiar from neon lamps,“ explains IGB scientist Dr. Michaela Muller. “It is done by placing the plastics into a vacuum. We introduce gases into this vacuum chamber and ignite them by applying a voltage. We can deposit different coatings with defined properties on the surface of the packaging, depending on the proportions of electrons, ions, neutrons and photons in this luminous gas mixture.“
The research scientists at the IGB are now working to optimize the coatings applied-- improving properties such as adhesive strength. “The coatings must not change the properties of the materials. They must remain capable of being industrially processed to form bottles, tubes, or stand-up pouches of the kind typically used for liquid soap,“ insists Muller.
In about two to three years, Stramm hopes, the bottles could be freely yielding their last drop of ketchup to consumers.

Cellular phones can be used to talk with owls in the wild, researchers now find. Beyond phone calls consisting entirely of “Who?“ placing networks of cell phones in the wild could help call to and listen for birds and beasts, enabling researchers to study faraway wildlife in their natural habitats.
“We’re in talks to set up such networks in Costa Rica, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea,“ researcher Dale Joachim, an MIT electrical engineer, told LiveScience. “It might be good for ecotourism, to hear the richness of sound there.“
Currently, wildlife biologists monitor birds and beasts by repeatedly venturing into the field to call out and listen for responses. “It dawned on me that could in part be automated,“ Joachim said.
Joachim, with biologist Eben Goodale and colleagues, first tested phones in the wild last year by wandering for a few hours around midnight in the woods of northeastern Connecticut, rigging phones for owls in autumn, LiveScience.com reported.
The researchers employed cell phones modified to listen via microphones and “talk“ via loudspeakers. The team next placed calls to the phones using a Web site that plays library audio clips of the barred owl (Strix varia) and Eastern screech owl (Megascops asio). Joachim had some familiarity with the avian world as he kept owls and raptors as pets when he was young. These were injured birds that he nursed back to health.
Despite concerns that cell phone audio quality was too poor for calls, the researchers found the owls responded just as well to hoots and trills over mobile phones as those played back on CD players. The phones also generally picked up calls from owls well, too.
In the future, Joachim said, “you could imagine listening to the sounds of birds from remote areas in your office over the Web, instead of music.“