You can already get a retinal implant to restore some sight when you’re blind, but the quality is usually too poor to be useful for more than avoiding collisions. A better solution is close at hand, however: Pixium Vision has successfully tested an implant that should go beyond basic vision. The tiny chip sits just behind the retina and uses infrared light to both stimulate images in your brain and power the whole device. Tests in rats generate vision equivalent to 20/250. That’s still far from flawless, but it’d be superior to the 20/500 you can get now — good enough that you could read the largest letter on an eye doctor’s chart. The eventual system for humans, which will use goggles to send images, should manage 20/120 and put wearers above the US’ legal standard for blindness. Trial runs start in 2016, so you may not have to wait much longer if you’re eager to give the implant a try. Filed under: Wearables , Science Comments Via: IEEE Spectrum Source: Pixium Vision (PDF) , Nature
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Infrared implant brings practical sight to the blind
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is warning against a new potential privacy threat: cameras that look inside cars and try to identify how many people are inside. This technology is a natural combination of simpler ones that have existed for years: basic object recognition software and road-side cameras (red light cameras, speeding cameras, license plate readers — you name it). Of course, we can extrapolate just a bit further, and point out that as soon as the cameras have high enough resolution, they can start running face recognition algorithms on the images, and determine the identities of a vehicle’s occupants. “The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), a government umbrella group that develops transportation and public safety initiatives across the San Diego County region, estimates that 15% of drivers in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes aren’t supposed to be there. After coming up short with earlier experimental projects, the agency is now testing a brand new technology to crack down on carpool-lane scofflaws on the I-15 freeway. … In short: the technology is looking at your image, the image of the people you’re with, your location, and your license plate. (SANDAG told CBS the systems will not be storing license plate data during the trial phase and the system will, at least for now, automatically redact images of drivers and passengers. Xerox’s software, however, allows police the option of using a weaker form of redaction that can be reversed on request.)” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
If you’re over the age of thirty, you’re a musical dinosaur. You probably don’t understand the garbage those “damn kids” are listening to and you don’t want to. You’re not cool. When did this happen? Spotify may have just figured it out. Read more… 
