Articles with the keyword: 
Bright lights, not-so-big pupils
piggy submitted, created time 6 days 7 hours (www.eurekalert.org)
A team of Johns Hopkins neuroscientists has worked out how some newly discovered light sensors in the eye detect light and communicate with the brain. The report appears online this week in Nature.
These light sensors are a small number of nerve cells in the retina that contain melanopsin molecules. Unlike conventional light-sensing cells in the retina—rods and cones—melanopsin-containing cells are not used for seeing images; instead, they monitor light levels to adjust the body's clock and control constriction of the pupils in the eye, among other functions 
Hormones Boost Frequency of Migraines with Visual Disturbances in Women
sea-maid submitted, created time 2 weeks 6 hours (www.hon.ch)
In women, hormones increase the frequency of an inherited form of severe migraine accompanied by visual disturbances called auras, according to a Massachusetts General Hospital study.
Researchers find the first vertebrate eye to use mirror instead of lens
sea-maid submitted, created time 2 weeks 1 day (www.newscientist.com)
The deep sea is full of surprises, and the four-eyed spookfish is up there with the best of them. It is the first vertebrate found with eyes that use mirrors, rather than a lens, to focus light.
Simple Eyes of Only Two Cells Guide Marine Zooplankton to the Light
piggy submitted, created time 1 month 2 weeks (www.sciencedaily.com)
Researchers unravel how the very first eyes in evolution might have worked and how they guide the swimming of marine plankton towards light.
Larvae of marine invertebrates – worms, sponges, jellyfish - have the simplest eyes that exist. They consist of no more than two cells: a photoreceptor cell and a pigment cell. These minimal eyes, called eyespots, resemble the "proto-eyes" suggested by Charles Darwin as the first eyes to appear in animal evolution. They cannot form images but allow the animal to sense the direction of light
Brain Reorganizes to Adjust for Loss of Vision
piggy submitted, created time 1 month 2 weeks (www.sciencedaily.com)
A new study from Georgia Tech shows that when patients with macular degeneration focus on using another part of their retina to compensate for their loss of central vision, their brain seems to compensate by reorganizing its neural connections. Age–related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. The study appears in the December edition of the journal Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience
Simple Brain Mechanisms Explain Arbitrary Human Visual Decisions
piggy submitted, created time 1 month 4 weeks (www.sciencedaily.com)
Mark Twain, a skeptic of the idea of free will, argues in his essay "What Is Man?" that humans do not command their minds or the opinions they form. "You did not form that [opinion]," a speaker identified as "old man" says in the essay. "Your [mental] machinery did it for you—automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it."
Twain's views get a boost this week from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and University of Chieti, Italy
Red Fish, Blue Fish, One Fish Becomes Two Fish
sea-maid submitted, created time 3 months 6 days (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)
Changes in vision lead to new species in cichlids in a form of sexual selection not usually seen (or at least not usually recognized).
Retinal transplants bear threefold fruit
Darkfrog submitted, created time 3 months 4 weeks (www.nature.com)
A formerly clinically blind woman's vision improved from 20/800 to 20/160--from one-fortieth of ordinary vision to one-eighth--after receiving donated retina. Six months after the operation, the started noticing the pendulum in her grandfather clock. For years, she found that she could read large-print books and emails and returned to her hobbies, knitting and sewing. Now, six years after her operation, her vision is fading, but it is still better than it was before the operation
Study says eyes evolved for X-Ray vision
sea-maid submitted, created time 4 months 1 week (esciencenews.com)
The advantage of using two eyes to see the world around us has long been associated solely with our capacity to see in 3-D. Now, a new study from a scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has uncovered a truly eye-opening advantage to binocular vision: our ability to see through things. Most animals — fish, insects, reptiles, birds, rabbits, and horses, for example — exist in non-cluttered environments like fields or plains, and they have eyes located on either side of their head
Gene therapy experiments improve vision in nearly blind
sea-maid submitted, created time 4 months 1 week (www.newsvine.com)
Scientists for the first time have used gene therapy to dramatically improve sight in people with a rare form of blindness, a development experts called a major advance for the experimental technique. Four of the six patients regained some vision.
Removal of "superfluous" retina creates (time) blind mice...
Darkfrog submitted, created time 6 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)
Removing a certain type of retinal cell from lab mice doesn't make them go blind, but it does shake up their body clocks; they quickly slip into a 23.5 hour cycle--the same as unaltered mice in total darkness. They also lost their ability to regulate pupil size, but not their other visual abilities, such as judging how far to jump to make it across a gap. This suggests that these melanopsin-expressing retinal ganglion cells (mRGCs) concern the detection of light, not the processing of visual information.
What I'm curious about now is whether blind humans do or do not have this problem
General Model of Vision, Au Naturel
jerry submitted, created time 7 months 4 days (www.sciencedirect.com)
Visual stimuli in the laboratory are artificial. How does the visual system process more complex, naturalistic stimuli? In this study, researchers bridge the chasm between artificial and natural stimuli by developing a general model for responses in the lateral geniculate nucleus, the main input to visual cortex.
Visual- and saccade-related signals in the primate inferior colliculus
cloudy submitted, created time 1 year 1 month (www.pnas.org)
The inferior colliculus (IC) is normally thought of as a predominantly auditory structure because of its early position in the ascending auditory pathway just before the auditory thalamus. Here, we show that a majority of IC neurons (64% of 180 neurons) in awake monkeys carry visual- and/or saccade-related signals in addition to their auditory responses (P < 0.05). The response patterns involve primarily excitatory visual responses, but also increased activity time-locked to the saccade, slow rises in activity time-locked to the onset of the visual stimulus, and inhibitory responses
Infants from bilingual homes preserve visual language skills longer
Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.nature.com)
According to studies out of the Universities of Oxford and of British Columbia, children under the age of six months react to the changes in mouth shape that occur when an adult speaker switches languages. Eight-month-old babies raised in bilingual homes retained this ability longer than their monolingual counterparts.
The study highlights the importance of mouth shape to very young children -- probably an adaptation for learning to talk -- but I don't see why babies born deaf wouldn't have that affinity too. I wonder how we could use this to help deaf children.
UF researchers awaken vision cells in blind mice
badboy submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.biologynews.net)
"University of Florida researchers used gene therapy to restore sight in mice with a form of hereditary blindness, a finding that has bearing on many of the most common blinding diseases.
Writing online in today’s (May 21) edition of Nature Medicine, scientists describe how they used a harmless virus to deliver corrective genes to mice with a genetic impairment that robs them of vision. "
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