MAGIC glasses might sound the stuff of Beano cartoons, but an American inventor has created a high-tech pair of superspecs that can enable you to see twice as far as anyone with perfect vision.
Ron Blum, an inventor and former ophthalmologist, has won a multimillion-dollar US government grant to develop his specs, which have lenses that alter minutely to compensate for all the tiny imperfections in your vision.
The US Government is interested in the glasses’ military potential (why else?) but Blum says that they can also create perfect near- vision as well as long- distance, thus correcting the type of far-sightedness that affects ageing eyes.
To create perfect distance vision, Blum’s system first scans patients’ eyes with an aberrometer, which bounces lasers off the back of the eyeball to create an exact map of the eye. Each minute aberration is then corrected by tiny electronically controlled, focus-altering pixels that are embedded in normal spectacle glass.
Blum says his specs can also create perfect close-up vision for far-sighted people by attaching a range-finder to the spectacles, so that they can determine how far away your head is from the newspaper or computer screen you’re reading, and bring it into exact focus.
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I’ve got half a mind ... most of my life
FULLY FUNCTIONING brains are a rare thing, according to two new studies: first they take far longer than expected to reach maturity; then they start to conk out early, too.
Neurologists at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, who compared the brains of 18-year-old student freshers with 25-year-old graduates, say that at 18 our brains still have a lot of developing to do.
They are still growing in areas that integrate emotion and reason, leaving us with teen heads until our mid-20s, they report in Human Brain Mapping. Then it’s plain sailing for about 15 years until things begin to deteriorate in early middle age, when we start to lose the ability to cope with distractions, says a Toronto University brain-scan study of healthy adult brains.
It reports in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that at about the age of 40, our frontal lobes start to go out of balance, cutting our ability to block out distractions and ruining our ability to multitask.
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Girls are a bad wheeze for mummy
BOY or girl? If the expectant mum’s wheezing, it’s much more likely to be a girl, say researchers at the Yale School of Medicine.
Women with asthma who are carrying girls have a high risk of it worsening but those carrying boys see their symptoms improve by 10 per cent, says the study of more than 700 expectant mothers.
The study authors are not certain why gender should affect asthmatic mothers but speculate that testosterone secreted by male foetuses may relax mothers’ lung tissues and inhibit their response to allergy-hormone histamines.
Hormones secreted by baby girls may worsen their mums’ symptoms, the authors add. It seems cruelly early for a lifetime of mother-daughter stuff to kick off.
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Music to my mouth
LISTEN, your meal is telling you all about itself. A Leeds University scientist has discovered that biting into food creates mighty blasts of ultrasound that help us to decide whether we like it.
Professor Malcolm Povey, a food physicist, sat down with an acoustic microscope and a plate of digestives and found that breaking a biscuit creates sound pulses at frequencies used by bats and dolphins.
Povey claimed at the International Ultrasound conference in Leeds this week that we subconsciously interpret this information. “The sound of food in the mouth is as important as taste, look and smell in deciding whether we like it or not,” he says.
He claims that his biscuit breakthrough could provide a scientific way of making appealing food: the more ultrasound peaks that a bite produces, the crunchier we think it is. Food manufacturers are likely to latch on to this, but, meanwhile, who needs an iPod if you’ve got a pea pod?
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Chop out the fags
IF YOUR fight to quit smoking is getting truly desperate, you could try surgery — any type of surgery will do.
A review of studies in Anesthesiology has found that people who quit just before having an operation have few problems with nicotine withdrawal and tend to stay off the fags for ever. Why? The researchers suggest that the anaesthetic drugs may help.