Popular Science

When Rajiv Bhushan’s father complained of blurry, browned vision and pain from bright lights, doctors told him that surgically replacing his eyes’ lenses was the only way to correct the cataracts that had left him legally blind. Instead, after learning that cataracts result from an age-related accumulation of proteins and lipids in a person’s lens, Bhushan, an electrical engineer, set to work concocting a chemical solution to break up the molecules clouding his father’s eyes.

Six years later, the eyedrops, called C-KAD, are entering the final stages of clinical testing. If all goes well, they will hit pharmacy shelves in two years, becoming the first non-surgical treatment.

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European travelers may soon have a chance to chat away on their own phones while in flight. For the new system to work, planes would be outfitted with small mobile base stations known as pico cells. The cells would be switched off during take-off, and turned on once the planes reach a given altitude, which would be a minimum of 3,000 meters. Phone signals would be routed to the mobile base stations, which would in turn dispatch signals to ground-based networks through a satellite link.

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An angry Apple iMac owner filed a class-action lawsuit against the company because she says the monitors don't display as many colors as advertised. The lawsuit claims that Apple knows its monitors only display 262,144 colors, but asserts in marketing materials that the machines flash millions of hues.

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So you haven’t gotten around to donating blood or getting on the bone marrow transplant list or taking a class on CPR. It’s time to step up, people. Fortunately for you, you can cross the last one off the list, sort of. The American Heart Association is letting everybody know that even if you aren’t trained in CPR, jumping in and administering chest compressions if you witness an adult collapse after having a heart attack is more than twice as likely to save his life than just calling 911 alone.

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It could be an aerial photo of an oil spill: liquid spheres pooling, oozing, dwarfing a bedraggled landscape. I half expect to zoom in on poisoned seal pups or waterbirds dragging their oil-soaked feathers. But the scene is microscopic. The “landscape” is made of E. coli. And what’s happening is exactly the opposite of what it seems. The little bugs aren’t drowning in fuel. They’re making it.

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Last fall we reported on the growing mess of garbage swirling in the North Pacific Gyre. It’s a swath of ocean arguably the size of the continental U.S. where all the plastic refuse from Asia and the western coast of North America ends up when it’s washed out to sea. Turtles mistake bags for jellyfish and birds mistake floating chips for prey. Animals have been discovered starved to death because the entire contents of their stomachs were plastic fragments. Sail a boat out to the middle of the gyre and the problem is in plain sight. Unfortunately for us, the more severe problem is the one we can’t see.

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Farmers in Southern California this summer aren’t planting as much as they usually would. It’s not because of a new government subsidy on corn or soybeans. It’s because they won’t have enough water with which to irrigate their crops. Is this a crisis for the farmers? Actually, it’s a crisis for San Diego and neighboring municipalities—they’re buying the water for $16.8 million a year from the Palo Verde Valley to help quench their own droughts. In exchange, the farmers are letting 26,000 acres go fallow this season.

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As far as TV history goes, public service announcements will go down as a small but memorable slice of the great broadcast pie. The weeping Native American, brought to tears by the garbage strewn across his great country's highways. "Knowing is half the battle." "This is drugs; this is your brain on drugs." And so on.

Now, Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection group have begun a privately funded PSA of their own with hopes of rallying the general public to the cause of preventing a global climate crisis.

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Paul Offit has written an op-ed in today’s New York Times which hastens to point out what other news stories have largely misrepresented in the Hannah Poling autism lawsuit: The outcome of the court ruling does not mean the government is admitting to a causal link between childhood vaccines and the onset of autis

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