Science Science is Cool.... - Page 54

Fish · 11:19 PM

This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.

Why should I care?:

Fish · 05-16-2013, 10:18 PM

Remember that X-Files episode, where Mulder and Scully encountered that massive underground fungus entity, that paralyzed them and did all kinds of crazy shit to subdue them underground?

Well... turns out it might be true... Kind of....

Fungus network 'plays role in plant communication'

Plants can communicate the onset of an attack from aphids by making use of an underground network of fungi, researchers have found.

Instances of plant communication through the air have been documented, in which chemicals emitted by a damaged plant can be picked up by a neighbour.

But below ground, most land plants are connected by fungi called mycorrhizae.

The new study, published in Ecology Letters, is the first to demonstrate these fungi also aid in communication.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen, the James Hutton Institute and Rothamsted Research, all in the UK, devised a clever experiment to isolate the effects of these thread-like networks of mycorrhizae.

The team concerned themselves with aphids, tiny insects that feed on and damage plants.

Many plants have a chemical armoury that they deploy when aphids attack, with chemicals that both repel the aphids and attract parasitic wasps that are aphids' natural predators.

The team grew sets of five broad bean plants, allowing three in each group to develop mycorrhizal networks, and preventing the networks' growth in the other two.

To prevent any through-the-air chemical communication, the plants were covered with bags.

As the researchers allowed single plants in the sets to be infested with aphids, they found that if the infested plant was connected to another by the mycorrhizae, the un-infested plant began to mount its chemical defence.

Those unconnected by the networks appeared not to receive the signal of attack, and showed no chemical response.

"Mycorrhizal fungi need to get [products of photosynthesis] from the plant, and they have to do something for the plant," explained John Pickett of Rothamsted Research.

"In the past, we thought of them making nutrients available from the [roots and soil], but now we see another evolutionary role for them in which they pay the plant back by transmitting the signal efficiently," he told BBC News.

Prof Pickett expressed his "abject surprise that it was just so powerful - just such a fantastic signalling system".

The finding could be put to use in many crops that suffer aphid damage, by arranging for a particular, "sacrificial" plant to be more susceptible to aphid infestation, so that when aphids threaten, the network can provide advance notice for the rest of the crop.

"Now we've got a chance in a really robust manner of switching on the defence when it is needed - not straining the plant to do it all the time - and to reduce the development of resistance (of the aphids to the plants' defences)," Prof Pickett said.

Fish · 05-16-2013, 10:36 PM

Quantum computing! Well... kind of....

Nasa buys into 'quantum' computer

A $15m computer that uses "quantum physics" effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.

It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.

Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.

This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second.

Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best.

Google wants to use the facility at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California to find out how quantum computing might advance techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including voice recognition.

University researchers will also get 20% of the time on the machine via the Universities Space Research Agency (USRA).

Nasa will likely use the commercially available machine for scheduling problems and planning.

Canadian company D-Wave Systems, which makes the machine, has drawn scepticism over the years from quantum computing experts around the world.

Until research outlined earlier this year, some even suggested its machines showed no evidence of using specifically quantum effects.

Quantum computing is based around exploiting the strange behaviour of matter at quantum scales.

Most work on this type of computing has focused on building quantum logic gates similar to the gate devices at the basis of conventional computing.

But physicists have repeatedly found that the problem with a gate-based approach is keeping the quantum bits, or qubits (the basic units of quantum information), in their quantum state.

"You get drop out… decoherence, where the qubits lapse into being simple 1s and 0s instead of the entangled quantum states you need. Errors creep in," says Prof Alan Woodward of Surrey University.

One gate opens...
Instead, D-Wave Systems has been focused on building machines that exploit a technique called quantum annealing - a way of distilling the optimal mathematical solutions from all the possibilities.

Annealing is made possible by physics effect known as quantum tunnelling, which can endow each qubit with an awareness of every other one.

"The gate model... is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing", Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4's Material World programme.

"And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we'll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea."

Dr Rose's approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions.

But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by Nasa and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers.

In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes.

A classic example of one of these "combinatorial optimisation" problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage.

The D-Wave Two chip can compare all the possible itineraries at once, rather than having to work through each in turn.

Reportedly costing up to $15m, housed in a garden shed-sized box that cools the chip to near absolute zero, it should be installed at Nasa and available for research by autumn 2013.

US giant Lockheed Martin earlier this year upgraded its own D-Wave machine to the 512 qubit D-Wave Two.

**notorious** · 05-18-2013, 07:35 AM

WTF?

I didn't hear anything about this!

http://news.yahoo.com/huge-rock-cras...152049489.html

Huge Rock Crashes Into Moon, Sparks Giant Explosion

By Clara Moskowitz

The moon has a new hole on its surface thanks to a boulder that slammed into it in March, creating the biggest explosion scientists have seen on the moon since they started monitoring it.

The meteorite crashed on March 17, slamming into the lunar surface at a mind-boggling 56,000 mph (90,000 kph) and creating a new crater 65 feet wide (20 meters). The crash sparked a bright flash of light that would have been visible to anyone looking at the moon at the time with the naked eye, NASA scientists say.

"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before." [The Greatest Lunar Crashes Ever]

NASA astronomers have been monitoring the moon for lunar meteor impacts for the past eight years, and haven't seen anything this powerful before.

Scientists didn't see the impact occur in real time. It was only when Ron Suggs, an analyst at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., reviewed a video of the bright moon crash recorded by one of the moon monitoring program's 14-inch telescopes that the event was discovered.

"It jumped right out at me, it was so bright," Suggs said.

Scientists deduced the rock had been roughly 1-foot-wide (between 0.3 to 0.4 meters) and weighted about 88 lbs (40 kg).The explosion it created was as powerful as 5 tons of TNT, NASA scientists said.

When researchers looked back at their records from March, they found that the moon meteor might not have been an isolated event.

"On the night of March 17, NASA and University of Western Ontario all-sky cameras picked up an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors right here on Earth," Cooke said. "These fireballs were traveling along nearly identical orbits between Earth and the asteroid belt."

Though Earth's atmosphere protected our planet's surface from being hit by these meteors, the moon has no such luck. Its lack of an atmosphere exposes it to all incoming space rocks, and the NASA monitoring program has spotted more than 300 meteor strikes that reached its surface since 2005.

Part of the motivation for the program is NASA's eventual intent to send astronauts back to the moon. When they arrive, they'll need to know how often meteors impact the surface, and whether certain parts of the year, coinciding with the moon's passage through crowded bits of the solar system, pose special dangers.

"We'll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-Moon system passes through the same region of space," Cooke said. "Meanwhile, our analysis of the March 17th event continues."

The scientists also hope to use NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to photograph the impact site to learn more about how the crash occurred.

Stewie · 05-18-2013, 07:41 AM

This guy's pretty impressive.

http://www.wimp.com/germansuperbrain/

Fish · 05-18-2013, 06:34 PM

Penis fencing! aka Raiders fan brohugs...

Does it look like these flatworms are dancing? Well, not quite. They're actually penis fencing.

This species is hermaphroditic and all individuals have working penises, testes and ovaries. Typically, being a mother is more time consuming and "costly" for the flatworm - eggs are larger and require more energy to form than sperm do. So, neither wants to be the mom. They fight with their penises, and the loser is inseminated by the winner.

mikey23545 · 05-20-2013, 04:39 PM

Injectable Oxygen Keeps People Alive Without Breathing

A team at Boston Children’s Hospital have invented a micro-particle that can be injected into your bloodstream to oxygenate your blood – without any help being required from your lungs.

The particles are able to keep a patient alive for up to 30 minutes after respiratory failure – which is normally enough time to prevent a heart attack or brain damage due to oxygen deprivation.

Each particle contains three to four times more oxygen than each of our own red blood cells. The oxygen is stored with a cell membrane made of fat. The membrane can be made of other materials but one issue in the past was that the particles became lodged in the body’s capillaries. These fat membranes however, are much more flexible and prevent this problem from happening.

Dr. John Kheir first began looking at ways to oxygenate the blood without breathing due to a tragic experience with one of his patients, a young girl. She was suffering from pneumonia and at one point her lungs started to fill with blood. It took 25 minutes to remove the blood from her lungs, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough time to prevent a cardiac arrest, leaving the girl in a serious condition which eventually lead to her death.

Potential uses for the new technology include medical, military and private. Military uses could include covert teams being able to stay submerged for 30 minutes at a time without having to come up for air. Private sector could include rescue teams being better protected, or an oil rig crew being able to fix underwater damage without the need for scuba equipment.

http://www.psfk.com/2013/05/indictab...breathing.html

AussieChiefsFan · 05-20-2013, 09:33 PM

Bump · 05-20-2013, 10:50 PM

Christians won't like this:

An experimental stem-cell treatment has restored the sight of a man blinded by the degeneration of his retinal cells. The man, who is taking part in a trial examining the safety of using human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to reverse two common causes of blindness, can now see well enough to be allowed to drive.

People undergoing treatment had reported modest improvements in vision earlier in the trial, which began in 2011, but this individual has made especially dramatic progress. The vision in his affected eye went from 20/400 – essentially blind – to 20/40, which is considered sighted.

"There's a guy walking around who was blind, but now can see," says Gary Rabin, chief executive officer of Advanced Cell Technology, the company in Marlborough, Massachusetts that devised the treatment. "With that sort of vision, you can have a driver's licence."

In all, the company has so far treated 22 patients who either have dry age-related macular degeneration, a common condition that leaves people with a black hole in the centre of their vision, or Stargardt's macular dystrophy, an inherited disease that leads to premature blindness. The company wouldn't tell New Scientist which of the two diseases the participant with the dramatic improvement has.

In both diseases, people gradually lose retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells. These are essential for vision as they recycle protein and lipid debris that accumulates on the retina, and supply nutrients and energy to photoreceptors – the cells that capture light and transmit signals to the brain.

The company is testing treatments for both conditions by turning hESCs into fresh RPE cells, then giving each trial participant a transplant of the cells beneath the retina in one eye.

Although the aim of the trial is primarily to check that the stem cells are safe, participants have reported improvements in their sight. The company intends to publish the outcomes in full when all the results are in.

**Rausch** · 05-20-2013, 10:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bump

Christians won't like this:

Not sure why that would be.

They have eyes too...

Bump · 05-20-2013, 10:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rausch

Not sure why that would be.

They have eyes too...

they think that stem cell research is the debil and a baby had to die for that man to see.

Sorter · 05-20-2013, 10:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bump

they think that stem cell research is the debil and a baby had to die for that man to see.

What about Christian doctors, dentists, surgeons, geneticists, biologists, etc?

**Rausch** · 05-20-2013, 11:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bump

they think that stem cell research is the debil and a baby had to die for that man to see.

Lung, heart, stem cell.

What's the difference?...

Bump · 05-20-2013, 11:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sorter

What about Christian doctors, dentists, surgeons, geneticists, biologists, etc?

They were probably brain washed from day 1 by their parents. That shit can stick for life no matter what information is available to you, I'm sure.

**Rausch** · 05-20-2013, 11:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bump

They were probably brain washed from day 1 by their parents. That shit can stick for life no matter what information is available to you, I'm sure.

I take it you haven't met many Catholics...

Bump · 05-20-2013, 11:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rausch

I take it you haven't met many Catholics...

I met plenty of catholic girls in college. All of them ****ed on the first night. I love me some hot catholic girls.

05-21-2012, 09:43 PM
Fish Ain't no relax! Join Date: Sep 2005 Casino cash: $228919	Science is Cool.... This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice. Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science. Why should I care?: Last edited by Fish; 05-05-2021 at 11:19 PM..
Posts: 48,460

05-16-2013, 10:18 PM	#796
Fish Ain't no relax! Join Date: Sep 2005 Casino cash: $228919	Remember that X-Files episode, where Mulder and Scully encountered that massive underground fungus entity, that paralyzed them and did all kinds of crazy shit to subdue them underground? Well... turns out it might be true... Kind of.... Fungus network 'plays role in plant communication' Plants can communicate the onset of an attack from aphids by making use of an underground network of fungi, researchers have found. Instances of plant communication through the air have been documented, in which chemicals emitted by a damaged plant can be picked up by a neighbour. But below ground, most land plants are connected by fungi called mycorrhizae. The new study, published in Ecology Letters, is the first to demonstrate these fungi also aid in communication. Researchers from the University of Aberdeen, the James Hutton Institute and Rothamsted Research, all in the UK, devised a clever experiment to isolate the effects of these thread-like networks of mycorrhizae. The team concerned themselves with aphids, tiny insects that feed on and damage plants. Many plants have a chemical armoury that they deploy when aphids attack, with chemicals that both repel the aphids and attract parasitic wasps that are aphids' natural predators. The team grew sets of five broad bean plants, allowing three in each group to develop mycorrhizal networks, and preventing the networks' growth in the other two. To prevent any through-the-air chemical communication, the plants were covered with bags. As the researchers allowed single plants in the sets to be infested with aphids, they found that if the infested plant was connected to another by the mycorrhizae, the un-infested plant began to mount its chemical defence. Those unconnected by the networks appeared not to receive the signal of attack, and showed no chemical response. "Mycorrhizal fungi need to get [products of photosynthesis] from the plant, and they have to do something for the plant," explained John Pickett of Rothamsted Research. "In the past, we thought of them making nutrients available from the [roots and soil], but now we see another evolutionary role for them in which they pay the plant back by transmitting the signal efficiently," he told BBC News. Prof Pickett expressed his "abject surprise that it was just so powerful - just such a fantastic signalling system". The finding could be put to use in many crops that suffer aphid damage, by arranging for a particular, "sacrificial" plant to be more susceptible to aphid infestation, so that when aphids threaten, the network can provide advance notice for the rest of the crop. "Now we've got a chance in a really robust manner of switching on the defence when it is needed - not straining the plant to do it all the time - and to reduce the development of resistance (of the aphids to the plants' defences)," Prof Pickett said. __________________
Posts: 48,460

05-16-2013, 10:36 PM	#797
Fish Ain't no relax! Join Date: Sep 2005 Casino cash: $228919	Quantum computing! Well... kind of.... Nasa buys into 'quantum' computer A $15m computer that uses "quantum physics" effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility. It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers. Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling. This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second. Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best. Google wants to use the facility at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California to find out how quantum computing might advance techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including voice recognition. University researchers will also get 20% of the time on the machine via the Universities Space Research Agency (USRA). Nasa will likely use the commercially available machine for scheduling problems and planning. Canadian company D-Wave Systems, which makes the machine, has drawn scepticism over the years from quantum computing experts around the world. Until research outlined earlier this year, some even suggested its machines showed no evidence of using specifically quantum effects. Quantum computing is based around exploiting the strange behaviour of matter at quantum scales. Most work on this type of computing has focused on building quantum logic gates similar to the gate devices at the basis of conventional computing. But physicists have repeatedly found that the problem with a gate-based approach is keeping the quantum bits, or qubits (the basic units of quantum information), in their quantum state. "You get drop out… decoherence, where the qubits lapse into being simple 1s and 0s instead of the entangled quantum states you need. Errors creep in," says Prof Alan Woodward of Surrey University. One gate opens... Instead, D-Wave Systems has been focused on building machines that exploit a technique called quantum annealing - a way of distilling the optimal mathematical solutions from all the possibilities. Annealing is made possible by physics effect known as quantum tunnelling, which can endow each qubit with an awareness of every other one. "The gate model... is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing", Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4's Material World programme. "And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we'll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea." Dr Rose's approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions. But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by Nasa and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers. In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes. A classic example of one of these "combinatorial optimisation" problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage. The D-Wave Two chip can compare all the possible itineraries at once, rather than having to work through each in turn. Reportedly costing up to $15m, housed in a garden shed-sized box that cools the chip to near absolute zero, it should be installed at Nasa and available for research by autumn 2013. US giant Lockheed Martin earlier this year upgraded its own D-Wave machine to the 512 qubit D-Wave Two. __________________
Posts: 48,460

05-18-2013, 07:35 AM	#798
notorious Supporter Join Date: May 2005 Location: Who knows? Casino cash: $845884	WTF? I didn't hear anything about this! http://news.yahoo.com/huge-rock-cras...152049489.html Huge Rock Crashes Into Moon, Sparks Giant Explosion By Clara Moskowitz The moon has a new hole on its surface thanks to a boulder that slammed into it in March, creating the biggest explosion scientists have seen on the moon since they started monitoring it. The meteorite crashed on March 17, slamming into the lunar surface at a mind-boggling 56,000 mph (90,000 kph) and creating a new crater 65 feet wide (20 meters). The crash sparked a bright flash of light that would have been visible to anyone looking at the moon at the time with the naked eye, NASA scientists say. "On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before." [The Greatest Lunar Crashes Ever] NASA astronomers have been monitoring the moon for lunar meteor impacts for the past eight years, and haven't seen anything this powerful before. Scientists didn't see the impact occur in real time. It was only when Ron Suggs, an analyst at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., reviewed a video of the bright moon crash recorded by one of the moon monitoring program's 14-inch telescopes that the event was discovered. "It jumped right out at me, it was so bright," Suggs said. Scientists deduced the rock had been roughly 1-foot-wide (between 0.3 to 0.4 meters) and weighted about 88 lbs (40 kg).The explosion it created was as powerful as 5 tons of TNT, NASA scientists said. When researchers looked back at their records from March, they found that the moon meteor might not have been an isolated event. "On the night of March 17, NASA and University of Western Ontario all-sky cameras picked up an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors right here on Earth," Cooke said. "These fireballs were traveling along nearly identical orbits between Earth and the asteroid belt." Though Earth's atmosphere protected our planet's surface from being hit by these meteors, the moon has no such luck. Its lack of an atmosphere exposes it to all incoming space rocks, and the NASA monitoring program has spotted more than 300 meteor strikes that reached its surface since 2005. Part of the motivation for the program is NASA's eventual intent to send astronauts back to the moon. When they arrive, they'll need to know how often meteors impact the surface, and whether certain parts of the year, coinciding with the moon's passage through crowded bits of the solar system, pose special dangers. "We'll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-Moon system passes through the same region of space," Cooke said. "Meanwhile, our analysis of the March 17th event continues." The scientists also hope to use NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to photograph the impact site to learn more about how the crash occurred.
Posts: 86,514

05-18-2013, 07:41 AM	#799
Stewie MVP Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West of the Equator Casino cash: $-160099	This guy's pretty impressive. http://www.wimp.com/germansuperbrain/
Posts: 13,767

05-18-2013, 06:34 PM	#800
Fish Ain't no relax! Join Date: Sep 2005 Casino cash: $228919	Penis fencing! aka Raiders fan brohugs... Does it look like these flatworms are dancing? Well, not quite. They're actually penis fencing. This species is hermaphroditic and all individuals have working penises, testes and ovaries. Typically, being a mother is more time consuming and "costly" for the flatworm - eggs are larger and require more energy to form than sperm do. So, neither wants to be the mom. They fight with their penises, and the loser is inseminated by the winner. __________________
Posts: 48,460

05-20-2013, 04:39 PM	#801
mikey23545 MVP Join Date: Aug 2000 Casino cash: $10015321	Injectable Oxygen Keeps People Alive Without Breathing A team at Boston Children’s Hospital have invented a micro-particle that can be injected into your bloodstream to oxygenate your blood – without any help being required from your lungs. The particles are able to keep a patient alive for up to 30 minutes after respiratory failure – which is normally enough time to prevent a heart attack or brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. Each particle contains three to four times more oxygen than each of our own red blood cells. The oxygen is stored with a cell membrane made of fat. The membrane can be made of other materials but one issue in the past was that the particles became lodged in the body’s capillaries. These fat membranes however, are much more flexible and prevent this problem from happening. Dr. John Kheir first began looking at ways to oxygenate the blood without breathing due to a tragic experience with one of his patients, a young girl. She was suffering from pneumonia and at one point her lungs started to fill with blood. It took 25 minutes to remove the blood from her lungs, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough time to prevent a cardiac arrest, leaving the girl in a serious condition which eventually lead to her death. Potential uses for the new technology include medical, military and private. Military uses could include covert teams being able to stay submerged for 30 minutes at a time without having to come up for air. Private sector could include rescue teams being better protected, or an oil rig crew being able to fix underwater damage without the need for scuba equipment. http://www.psfk.com/2013/05/indictab...breathing.html
Posts: 12,314

05-20-2013, 09:33 PM	#802
AussieChiefsFan MVP Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Sydney, Australia Casino cash: $5968501
Posts: 13,760

05-20-2013, 10:50 PM	#803
Bump YOU take YOUR seat Join Date: Nov 2007 Casino cash: $155105	Christians won't like this: An experimental stem-cell treatment has restored the sight of a man blinded by the degeneration of his retinal cells. The man, who is taking part in a trial examining the safety of using human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to reverse two common causes of blindness, can now see well enough to be allowed to drive. People undergoing treatment had reported modest improvements in vision earlier in the trial, which began in 2011, but this individual has made especially dramatic progress. The vision in his affected eye went from 20/400 – essentially blind – to 20/40, which is considered sighted. "There's a guy walking around who was blind, but now can see," says Gary Rabin, chief executive officer of Advanced Cell Technology, the company in Marlborough, Massachusetts that devised the treatment. "With that sort of vision, you can have a driver's licence." In all, the company has so far treated 22 patients who either have dry age-related macular degeneration, a common condition that leaves people with a black hole in the centre of their vision, or Stargardt's macular dystrophy, an inherited disease that leads to premature blindness. The company wouldn't tell New Scientist which of the two diseases the participant with the dramatic improvement has. In both diseases, people gradually lose retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells. These are essential for vision as they recycle protein and lipid debris that accumulates on the retina, and supply nutrients and energy to photoreceptors – the cells that capture light and transmit signals to the brain. The company is testing treatments for both conditions by turning hESCs into fresh RPE cells, then giving each trial participant a transplant of the cells beneath the retina in one eye. Although the aim of the trial is primarily to check that the stem cells are safe, participants have reported improvements in their sight. The company intends to publish the outcomes in full when all the results are in.
Posts: 36,009