Making Sense of Sight

Meet some of the people featured in the October 2014 issue of The Scientist.

An issue highlighting advances in vision research

October 2014's selection of notable quotes

Retrieving sound from video recordings of inanimate objects can have surprising applications.

Despite a lack of vision, a blind cavefish can count. Sort of.

New software that can trace the individual paths of every animal in a massive swarm could help biologists unravel the secrets of collective behavior.

Extinct, giant arthropods, long assumed to be top predators of ancient seas, didn’t have sharp enough eyesight to be refined hunters.

Scientists are beginning to embrace social media as a viable means of communicating with public audiences.

Researchers are beginning to study in depth the largely uncharted territory of the eye’s microbial composition.

Scientists adapt an in vivo retina recorder for ex vivo use.

An overview of visual processing

Retinal glial cells acting as optical fibers shuttle longer wavelengths of light to individual cones.

Sounds trigger a response in the visual cortex that predicts how accurately a person can identify a visual target.

In mice, adult cone cell outer segments and their visual functions deteriorate if two microRNAs are not present.

Vision researcher John Dowling has spent a lifetime studying the neural architecture of the retina. He is closing his laboratory after 53 years, opting to extend these studies as a postdoc.

Project Scientist, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Age: 32

Techniques for analyzing RNA-protein interactions

Techniques for mapping chromosome conformation

A handful of stem cell therapeutics for vision disorders are showing promise in early-stage trials, and still more are in development. But there’s a long road to travel before patients see real benefit.
 

Bed bugs are but one example of a species whose populations have evolved in response to human behavior.

William Briggs’s theory of optic nerve architecture was unusual and incorrect, but years later it led to Isaac Newton’s explanation of binocular vision.