>Stroke gives ‘blind as bat’ 70-year-old perfect vision

>

Malcolm Darby, 70, has worn thick ‘jam jar’ glasses his whole life now has perfect vision following a massive stroke, it has emerged.

Retired architect Mr Darby, from Leicestershire, had worn spectacles since the age of two but was stunned when he came round after surgery to clear the blood clot causing his stroke, that he could see clearly without his glasses.

Mr Darby, now has better sight than the average 20-year-old having always said he was effectively as ‘blind as a bat’.

But he was stunned to come round from a life-saving two-hour operation to find he could see clearly for the first time in his life,

Mr Darby, a grandfather of four, said: “It’s absolutely amazing. I think what has happened is a miracle.

“I always tell people that as odd as it may sound, having a stroke was the best thing that happened to me.”

Malcolm suffered a major stroke on May 13 last year when he was working in his office at home in Oakham and managed to tell his wife Sylvia, 68, to dial 999 before he collapsed.

He was rushed to Kettering General Hospital for surgery where a two-hour operation was carried out to remove a blood clot that was blocking 80 per cent of his right carotid artery in his neck.

The blockage meant his brain was being starved of oxygen and his life was in danger.

The operation was successful and when Dr Darby woke from the anaesthetic he said he thought his vision had become even worse.

He said: “I was still a bit fuzzy from the surgery but reached for my glasses and put them on and I couldn’t see a thing.

“I thought, ‘oh no’ I’m going to have to spend more money on new glasses.

“Then when I took them off I noticed a nurse carrying a newspaper upside down and I could read what it said. It didn’t register at first and then suddenly I realised I could see.

“The stroke meant I couldn’t speak so I was pointing at things on the ward and shouting gibberish at people. I wanted to tell people I could see.

“Eventually a nurse gave me some paper and a pen and I wrote down that my sight was back.”

Mrs Darby said: “It’s amazing. He can read things I need glasses for. He only uses his reading glasses for very tiny print.

“After 50 years of marriage and seeing him wearing glasses every day, it’s strange to see him without them.

“He’s got better sight than most 20-year-olds.”

It is unclear why the stroke or the operation appears to have caused such a dramatic improvement in Mr Darby’s sight but doctors believe there may have been pressure on the optic nerve at the back of the eye which was relieved as the clot was cleared.

via Stroke gives ‘blind as bat’ 70-year-old perfect vision – Telegraph.

>’Surreal’ sight of albino otter

>

An otter charity has said an image of a rare albino otter has been captured by an amateur wildlife photographer.

Karen Jack said the sight of the white animal eating a fish on rocks in Moray was “surreal”.

Grace Yoxon, of the Skye-based International Otter Survival Fund (IOSF) said the otter was “extremely rare”.

Ms Jack had to wait for the animal to reappear from the sea after catching a quick glimpse of it earlier.

She said: “I have been into photography for about three years as a hobby and love photographing wildlife, landscapes and my two cats.

“But it was just an amazing and surreal view of the albino otter, and for it to sit there and eat while we watched on was mind blowing.”

via BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Highlands and Islands | ‘Surreal’ sight of albino otter.

>No Impact Man

>

Colin Beavan so despaired at a lack of political action on climate change that he decided to see what difference he could make by living for a year with as little impact on the environment as possible.Beavan and his reluctant wife, Michelle Conlin, drastically changed their lifestyle, doing their best not to create trash, cause carbon dioxide emissions or pour toxins into the water supply and by buying only local produce.

The New Yorkers rode bikes to get places, walked up and down the nine flights of stairs to their apartment and cooked meals with food from a local farmers market. They also got rid of their television and bought no new clothes for themselves or their 18-month-old daughter Isabella.

Six months into the year, came the most dramatic step — they switched off the electricity.

“It wasn’t about being an environmentalist and then doing it. It was about just being a concerned citizen and stumbling forward,” Beavan, author of two history books, said in an interview.

“We jumped in without knowing what we were doing,” added Conlin, a writer for BusinessWeek.

Beavan has described his experiences in a book, “No Impact Man.” A documentary of the same name, directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, will be released in the United States this month.

“Just doing a little bit is not actually enough,” said Beavan, who also blogged about his year-long experiment. “If we are essentially going to change the planet … we have to consider changing our way of life.”

Greenhouse gases emitted by burning coal, oil and gas are warming the planet. Governments are due to meet in December in Denmark to agree a new U.N. climate. The hope is to avoid some of the more drastic effects of global warming which include more droughts, floods and the spread of diseases.

…. The couple said the year was hard because U.S. culture is not equipped to support sustainable living.

But the project produced “hidden joys.” While Conlin at first resented her husband for not letting her use the dishwasher, she grew to love spending time with her daughter doing the dishes.

“I exchanged my addiction to screens and my high fructose corn syrup induced haze for eating really clean food and feeling good and having an intimacy with my family and friends,” Conlin said.

Living with little impact was not only good for the planet, it was also good for their bank account. Conlin said the couple cut their discretionary spending by about 50 percent.

The couple still tries to live sustainably, although not as radically. They still ride bikes, but occasionally take taxis, and they still live without a dishwasher, freezer, clothes dryer and air-conditioner.

– yahoo

>Ever Wonder About Banana Seeds?

>

Image: A seed-packed wild musa (banana)

The banana … is a freakish and fragile genetic mutant; one that has survived through the centuries due to the sustained application of selective breeding by diligent humans. Indeed, the “miraculous” banana is far from being a no-strings-attached gift from nature. Its cheerful appearance hides a fatal flaw— one that threatens its proud place in the grocery basket. The banana’s problem can be summed up in a single word: sex.

The banana plant is a hybrid, originating from the mismatched pairing of two South Asian wild plant species: Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana. Between these two products of nature, the former produces unpalatable fruit flesh, and the latter is far too seedy for enjoyable consumption. Nonetheless, these closely related plants occasionally cross-pollinate and spawn seedlings which grow into sterile, half-breed banana plants. Some ten thousand years ago, early human experimenters noted that some of these hybridized Musa bore unexpectedly tasty, seedless fruit with an unheard-of yellowness and inexplicably amusing shape. They also proved an excellent source of carbohydrates and other important nutrients. Despite the hybrid’s unfortunate sexual impotence, shrewd would-be agriculturalists realised that the plants could be cultivated from suckering shoots and cuttings taken from the underground stem.

The genetically identical progeny produced this way remained sterile, yet the new plant could be widely propagated with human help. An intensive and prolonged process of selective breeding—aided by the variety of hybrids and occasional random genetic mutations—eventually evolved the banana into its present familiar form. Arab traders carried these new wonderfruit to Africa, and Spanish conquistadors relayed them onwards to the Americas. Thus the tasty new banana was spared from an otherwise unavoidable evolutionary dead-end.

via Damn Interesting • The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana.

Now you know why there are no banana seeds.

>New Understanding of the Heart’s Evolution

>

Humans, like other warm-blooded animals, expend a lot of energy and need a lot of oxygen. Our four-chambered hearts make this possible. It gives us an evolutionary advantage: We’re able to roam, hunt and hide even in the cold of night, or the chill of winter.

Now scientists have a better understanding how the complex heart evolved.

The story starts with frogs, which have a three-chambered heart that consists of two atria and one ventricle. As the right side of a frog’s heart receives deoxygenated blood from the body, and the left side receives freshly oxygenated blood from the lungs, the two streams of blood mix together in the ventricle, sending out a concoction that is not fully oxygenated to the rest of the frog’s body.

Turtles are a curious transition — they still have three chambers, but a wall, or septum is beginning to form in the single ventricle. This change affords the turtle’s body blood that is slightly richer in oxygen than the frog’s.

Birds and mammals, however, have a fully septated ventricle — a bona fide four-chambered heart. This configuration ensures the separation of low-pressure circulation to the lungs, and high-pressure pumping into the rest of the body.

via New Understanding of the Heart’s Evolution | LiveScience.

>India’s First Moon Probe Lost, But Data May Yield Finds

>

India’s first moon exploration mission was cut short Sunday after the country’s national space agency lost radio contact with Chandrayaan-1, an unmanned spacecraft orbiting the moon.

The cause of the communications breakdown is unknown, but repeated attempts to reestablish contact with the probe failed.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) terminated the mission over the weekend.

“The ISRO personnel managing the mission have made it clear there is little hope,” said Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Treasure Trove of Data

Despite the mission’s premature end, the probe has already yielded a treasure trove of useful data, said Pieters, who is the principal investigator of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA instrument on Chandrayaan-1.

Chandrayaan-1, which launched in October 2008, was meant to spend at least two years in lunar orbit sending back information from its suite of 11 scientific instruments. (See a picture of the Chandrayaan-1 launch.)

NASA’s mapping tool, one of the probe’s five foreign-built instruments, was designed to map the lunar surface in unprecedented detail in visible and near-infrared light.

Part of the M3 mission was to determine the distribution of elements and minerals on the moon’s surface, data that NASA had hoped would be useful for future manned missions to the moon or other planets.

(Related: “Apollo 11: 5 Little-Known Facts About the Moon Landing.”)

Before the probe lost contact, the M3 instrument had successfully completed a cursory global survey of mineralogy on the moon, Pieters noted.

That first step was supposed to set the stage for higher-resolution mapping of the lunar surface.

But “even with the low-resolution data we have from the first phase, we have several new and completely unexpected discoveries,” Pieters said.

The team is not yet revealing what those discoveries might be, because other scientists are still reviewing the data.

Pieters called the early loss of Chandrayaan-1 an “enormous disappointment,” but she said her team is already looking into a future flight of a duplicate M3 instrument.

via India’s First Moon Probe Lost, But Data May Yield Finds.

>Astronomers snap most distant black hole in universe

>

False-color image of the most distant black hole currently known. In addition to the bright central black hole (white), the image shows the surrounding host galaxy (red). The white bar indicates an angle on the sky of 4 arcseconds or 1/900th of a degree

Most scientists believe the universe is rapidly expanding following a catastrophic event known as the Big Bang.

Light from distant objects is therefore stretched and shifted to longer wavelengths. This process, known as the redshift, is used to calculate huge distances in space.

Study leader Dr Goto said: ‘It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the sun.

‘The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe.’

Scientists hope the new images will explain how galaxies and black holes have managed to evolve together.

Black holes cannot be seen directly because they are so dense that light cannot escape from their gravitational pull.

However, matter falling into a black hole heats up from friction as it swirls around the event horizon of the black hole at great speeds. The hot material radiates strongly in ultraviolet and visible light.

Until now, studying host galaxies in the distant universe has been extremely difficult

because the blinding bright light from the vicinity of the black hole makes it more difficult to see the already faint light from the host galaxy.

To see the supermassive black hole, the team of scientists used new red-sensitive charge-coupled devices (CCDs) installed in the Suprime-Cam camera on the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea.

CCDs are used in many light detecting gadgets from photocopiers to bar-code readers. In astronomy they are used to collect analogue information (such as light or an electrical charge from a distant object) and convert it into digital information that can be analyzed by computer software.

Professor Satoshi Miyazaki of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) is a lead investigator for the creation of the new CCDs and a collaborator on this project. He said: ‘The improved sensitivity of the new CCDs has brought an exciting
discovery as its very first result.’

A careful analysis of the colours revealed that 40 per cent of light around 9100Angstrom is from the host galaxy itself and 60 per cent is from the surrounding ionized nebulae illuminated by the black hole.

via Astronomers snap most distant black hole in universe | Mail Online.

>U.S. consumer bankruptcies up 24 percent in August

>

Bankruptcy filings by U.S. consumers rose 24 percent in August compared with a year earlier and could reach 1.4 million this year, according to an American Bankruptcy Institute and National Bankruptcy Research Center report released on Wednesday.

Despite the spike, consumer bankruptcy filings last month were down 5 percent from July.

The August bankruptcies brought the 2009 number to 922,000.

In 2008, a total of 1.1 million consumers filed for bankruptcy, according to ABI.

via U.S. consumer bankruptcies up 24 percent in August | Reuters.

>Barack Obama gets a sneaky visit from daughter Sasha in the Oval Office

>

Let’s hope that Mr President doesn’t have his finger anywhere near that red button. Because very soon, someone’s going to make him jump. This picture shows eight-year-old Sasha Obama sneaking up on her father Barack while he is hard at work in the Oval Office. It was taken by the official White House photographer – who presumably didn’t give the game away to his boss. The picture illustrates one of the advantages of working from home. The president and wife, Michelle, have said they have enjoyed spending more family time together since their move to Washington.

The photo is reminiscent of a series of snaps taken in 1963 showing JFK junior playing under the Resolute desk while his father worked.

via Barack Obama gets a sneaky visit from daughter Sasha in the Oval Office | Mail Online.

Okay, I know I’m probably just re-broadcasting propaganda, but I really do find it interesting. Imagine yourself at that desk, for example.

>Believing is seeing, thoughts color perception

>

Folk wisdom usually has it that “seeing is believing,” but new research suggests that “believing is seeing,” too – at least when it comes to perceiving other people’s emotions.

An international team of psychologists from the United States, New Zealand and France has found that the way we initially think about the emotions of others biases our subsequent perception (and memory) of their facial expressions. So once we interpret an ambiguous or neutral look as angry or happy, we later remember and actually see it as such.

The study, published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, “addresses the age-old question: ‘Do we see reality as it is, or is what we see influenced by our preconceptions?'” said coauthor Piotr Winkielman, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. “Our findings indicate that what we think has a noticeable effect on our perceptions.”

“We imagine our emotional expressions as unambiguous ways of communicating how we’re feeling,” said coauthor Jamin Halberstadt, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, “but in real social interactions, facial expressions are blends of multiple emotions – they are open to interpretation. This means that two people can have different recollections about the same emotional episode, yet both be correct about what they ‘saw.’ So when my wife remembers my smirk as cynicism, she is right: her explanation of the expression at the time biased her perception of it. But it is also true that, had she explained my expression as empathy, I wouldn’t be sleeping on the couch.”

“It’s a paradox,” Halberstadt added. “The more we seek meaning in other emotions, the less accurate we are in remembering them.”

The researchers point out that implications of the results go beyond everyday interpersonal misunderstandings – especially for those who have persistent or dysfunctional ways of understanding emotions, such as socially anxious or traumatized individuals. For example, the socially anxious have negative interpretations of others’ reactions that may permanently color their perceptions of feelings and intentions, perpetuating their erroneous beliefs even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Other applications of the findings include eyewitness memory: A witness to a violent crime, for example, may attribute malice to a perpetrator – an impression which, according to the researchers, will influence memory for the perpetrator’s face and emotional expression.

The researchers showed experimental participants still photographs of faces computer-morphed to express ambiguous emotion and instructed them to think of these faces as either angry or happy. Participants then watched movies of the faces slowly changing expression, from angry to happy, and were asked to find the photograph they had originally seen. People’s initial interpretations influenced their memories: Faces initially interpreted as angry were remembered as expressing more anger than faces initially interpreted as happy.

Even more interesting, the ambiguous faces were also perceived and reacted to differently. By measuring subtle electrical signals coming from the muscles that control facial expressions, the researchers discovered that the participants imitated – on their own faces – the previously interpreted emotion when viewing the ambiguous faces again. In other words, when viewing a facial expression they had once thought about as angry, people expressed more anger themselves than did people viewing the same face if they had initially interpreted it as happy.

Because it is largely automatic, the researchers write, such facial mimicry reflects how the ambiguous face is perceived, revealing that participants were literally seeing different expressions.

“The novel finding here,” said Winkielman, of UC San Diego, “is that our body is the interface: The place where thoughts and perceptions meet. It supports a growing area of research on ’embodied cognition’ and ’embodied emotion.’ Our corporeal self is intimately intertwined with how – and what – we think and feel.” – ea

Are your past and present wishes and fears causing the future you will experience? You bet! It is in our wiring.