Today in Science

A couple of interesting scientific developments have been released in the last 24 hours or so. Possibly the most far-reaching is MIT’s announcement that they have successfully implanted a computer chip into optic nerves. These chips can take data from a wireless camera feed, and pass it into the optic nerve to be relayed to the brain. This opens up the chance for blind people to gain partial (or, later, full) vision. So far the experiments have been restricted to small pigs, but the team hopes to start human trials within the next 36 months. The team stress that at the moment, the implants are likely to provide enough vision to navigate a room and recognise different individuals. Even so, that would be a huge improvement for the blind. Eventually of course, this technology may lead to the sort of fully immersive cyberspace experience that writers have been talking about since William Gibson’s glorious Neuromancer.

MIT Eyeball Camera (c) Shawn Kelly

The other interesting press release is quite a bit more cosmic. Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University has been working with NASA on a way to sift lunar soil for oxides, so that they can be broken down to produce oxygen and water, both for astronauts and to power rockets. There’s plenty of oxygen up there, it’s just bound into the soil. If it can be practically harvested, then a moon base becomes a perfectly feasible proposition, opening much wider ranges for space exploration. Fuelling rockets for return trips is actually more of a challenge for NASA than bringing food and water for moon base residents would be — much of the expense of any journey is in carrying fuel up for the return journey. In normal gravity, oxide harvesting is pretty simple; the CWRU research has been investigating whether the same processes would work in the moon’s restricted gravity. The good news is that the answer appears to be ‘Yes’.

So whether you’re looking inward, to virtual realms, or outward, to the farthest real ones, today has seen us take a fairly big step forward.

As an aside, poor old pandas got a bit of a bashing this week when TV wildlife presenter Chris Packham suggested that perhaps we should let them die out so we can save the money for helping less, well, idiotic species. Packham argued that because their evolutionary niche is weak, we ought to consider whether we’re using resources effectively in helping them.

But pandas wouldn’t be endangered if humans weren’t poaching them and destroying their lands, and trying to imagine the world without human meddling is just laughable at this point anyway. Pandas are cute and cuddly, and appeal to us. Maybe that’s the smartest evolutionary niche that there is, at the moment. Like it or not, humans have become an evolutionary force, and to ignore that is frankly perverse. Besides, it takes a hard-hearted person to suggest letting the lovable fur-balls die out in favour of saving various extra toads, flatworms and other less photogenic species.