KidsHealth - the Web's most visited site about children. Home. The Anatomists. A team of scientists hopes to improve the sight of blind people by implanting proteins from spinach leaves into their eyes. When light falls on the proteins, it creates an electrical voltage, which could stimulate healthy regions of the retina and produce meaningful images, they say. "The idea is to insert these proteins into cells in the retina," says Elias Greenbaum of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, US. "If we can do that, we know light can make them produce voltages high enough to stimulate the optic nerve. " Greenbaum, who is working on the project with Mark Humayun of the University of Southern California's Doheny Eye Institute, Los Angeles, says the spinach proteins - known as photo-reaction centres - perform a similar task to photoreceptor cells in the retina.
These cells, which lie at the base of the retina, send electrical pulses to the optic nerve when illuminated. These impulses are then interpreted as images by the brain. Fatty spheres More From New Scientist. Eyeball squeezing could correct sight - 21 March 2002 - New Scie. A light tap on the side of your head could one day restore your eyesight, believe scientists. The tap would tighten a band of artificial muscle wrapped round your eyeballs, changing their shape and bringing blurry images into focus. While the idea has a high 'yuk' factor, the people behind it are confident it will be a safe and effective way to improve vision. Mohsen Shahinpoor and his team at the University of New Mexico call their artificial muscle a "smart eye band".
It will be stitched to the sclera, the tough white outer part of the eyeball, and activated by an electromagnet in a hearing-aid-sized unit fitted behind one ear. Most of the eye's focusing is done by the cornea, the hard transparent surface that covers both the pupil and the iris; the lens is responsible only for fine-tuning. If the cornea or lens do not focus strongly enough or the eyeball is too short, the light will focus behind the retina, blurring images of close-up objects. Elongated eyeball Click and read.