New Retinal Implant gives Sight to Nine Blind people
German and Hungarian researchers have brought sight to nine blind patients with hereditary retinal degeneration, using a subretinally implanted microelectronic chip with 1500 pixels.The chip size is approximately 3mm x 3mm and is surgically implanted below the fovea (area of sharpest vision in the retina).
It provides a diamond-shaped visual field of 15 degrees diagonally across chip corners.
It is powered by a subdermal coil behind the ear that is powered from a battery via transdermal inductive transmission.
The microelectronic chip has 1,500 independent microphotodiode-amplifier electrode elements.
“So far, our approach using subretinal electronic implants is the only one that has successfully mediated images in a trial with freely moving blind persons by means of a light sensor array that moves with the eye,” the scientists said.
“All the other current approaches require an extraocular camera that does not link image capture to eye movements, which, therefore, does not allow the utilization of microsaccades for refreshing the perceived images.”
In most hereditary retinal diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa, the photoreceptors progressively degenerate, often causing blindness in adult life, and there is no therapy available to treat this disease.
How long before the blind see better than us through artificial organs? We could replace our natural eyesight with something better.
[url=]We Are the World: inviting everyone onboard the 100YSS is practical and will help to ensure its success[/url]
Digital memory of approximately 1022 bytes, the size of all human mindfiles in aggregate, what should be called the human “sapienome,” will be available within 20 years at less than 1% of the likely weight and cost of the 100 YSS. Ten billion people, times one trillion bytes, yields 1022 bytes.Daedalus starship (credit: David Hardy)
The Project Daedelus starship, either in its original British Interplanetary Society version or in subsequent self-replicating conceptualizations, had a payload mass of on the order of 500 tons [6]. Orion Starship designs of Freeman Dyson had estimated costs ranging from a tenth 10% to 100% of 1968 US GNP [7].The past five decades of relatively steady, 18-month doubling rates in constant cost for digital memory is not expected to change over the coming decades, due to economic demand, competition and the availability of three-dimensional traditional and novel computing substrates [8].
Hence, by exponential growth, today’s terabyte of memory will become a giga-terabyte of memory in 45 years. Ten such memory modules would hold a ten billion person human sapienome at that time. Alternatively, a few thousand mega-terabyte modules could contain the human sapienome about 30 years from now.
A terabyte today costs around $100 and weighs about 0.5 kg. These numbers are not significantly different from lesser amounts of memory in years past, and are considered by Ray Kurzweil to remain constant or shrink with exponential growth [8]. Hence, 45 years from now, the mass and cost of the human sapienome on a 100YSS would be insignificant. Even 30 years from now, the mass would be a few thousand pounds and the cost about $1 million. This represents less than 1% of the mass and cost of the starship.
Lifenaut members (credit: LifeNaut)
Universal access to information technology needed to create a mindfile is at hand. Already three-fourths of the world’s population has a mobile phone, about one-fourth of which are smartphones capable of full mindfile creation capabilities.Specialized websites to create mindfiles, such as LifeNaut.com and CyBeRev.org, as well as more generic websites that can also be used to create mindfiles, such as Google+ and Facebook, are free to the public.
Virtually every human being will be able to freely create a mindfile, as smartphone ownership becomes all-but universal over the next decade (with shared access to one for individuals in deep poverty). Hence, there are neither economic nor technological barriers to the creation of a human sapienome.
This all has to do with the Technological Singularity.
Pretty much.
It's not so much that Ganon's truly vulnerable to holy weapons, though, so much as that he's evil and the holy weapons in Zelda smite evil, but you're right as far as the Harry Potter verse lacking anything powerful enough or evil smity enough to achieve putting him down.
The Triforce of Power sustains him, and unless they can muster the power to overcome it, they cannot put him down, so... Yeah.