Eye

It's easy for us to forget that our computers are equipped with "electronic eyes," potentially watching us at all times. Scientists are now exploring the dynamics of the relationship, with a creepy – but fully functional – human-eye-like webcam.

Eye tracking cameras and AI analysis can reveal your identity, gender, age, ethnicity, weight, personality traits, drug habits, emotions, skills, abilities, fears, interests, and sexual preferences, says a rather dystopian research review.

Glaucoma can cause vision loss that's currently irreversible. But now scientists have found that removing a membrane in the eye could help transplanted cells migrate into the optic nerve and repair the connections, potentially restoring lost vision.

Spanish researchers have created a new potential treatment for age-related macular degeneration, which is currently untreatable – a biohybrid artificial retina, made of silk and loaded with new human cells that can integrate and repair the damage.

New research is building on the suggestion that our ability to effectively hear something is influenced by the position of our eyes. The study found auditory attention seems to be intertwined with visual spatial attention.

California's EyeQue has launched a Kickstarter for a vision test system called the VisionCheck 2 that makes use of a smartphone attachment and an app to provide personalized eye tests in the comfort of a user's home.

Presently, glaucoma is treated via daily-administered eye drops, surgery, or implanted devices – none of which are guaranteed to be successful. In the future, however, it's possible that a twice-yearly injection could do the trick.

Using gene therapy, Harvard scientists have restored vision to mice suffering glaucoma by rewinding the aging process in their cells. The team says the research is a proof of concept for slowing the symptoms of aging with epigenetics.

A new gene therapy treatment may be able to save the vision of patients with a blindness-causing genetic disease. DOA currently has no preventative or cure, but in tests in mice and human cells the team was able to slow progression of the disease.

Researchers in Australia are claiming an important breakthrough in glaucoma research, demonstrating how the degenerative condition can be treated using an innovative form of gene therapy that repairs damaged optic nerve cells.

In some forms of blindness, certain parts of the eye still work but damage to light-sensitive cells disrupts vision. Now, researchers have used gene therapy to bypass damaged cells and restore partial vision to mice that were completely blind.

A protein, previously found to be an effective blood-based biomarker of neurodegenerative diseases, has for the first time been detected in eye fluid. The discovery lays the foundation for eye tests to catch neurodegenerative diseases before symptoms appear.