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Atlanta's Weekly E-Magazine
Feb 8th - Feb 15th, 2002
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The Wonders of Science..
Behold the Bionic Eye!
World News
Market News
Our thanks to gotlaughs.com for sharing this classic with the WORLD.
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Next Tuesday is Mardi Gras "Fat Tuesday", commemorating the last day of revelry before entering the fasting weeks ahead and the Lenten season. There is no city on this earth which celebrates Mardi Gras with more parties, more parades, more floats, so intensely and for so long, than ... New Orleans.
New Orlerans is a party city. The folks like to celebrate every meaningful and historic event with a festival. Music, dance and food are the key ingredients. As the Louisiana Cajuns say: "Laissez les bon temps rouler."
"Let the good times roll." The most elaborate Mardi Gras celebration each year takes place in New Orleans. Thousands of locals and visitors watch the parades and the large floats moving through the streets. Hundreds of thousands of colorful doubloons and beads are tossed over onto the onlookers. It is a decidedly festive atmosphere where everyone seems to be having fun.
Another famous celebration in New Orleans is the jazz funeral. When a jazz musician dies, a jazz band marches to the cemetary playing appropriate tunes. The leader of the band carries an umbrella, sometimes with a dove on the top. The dove symbolizes peace, while the umbrella provides shade from the sun and suggests a tempo to the band. Once the deceased is buried, the band leaves the cemetary playing upbeat, happy tunes like "When the Saints Go Marching In."
The South, due to its fair weather, is certainly the region for holding festivals and parades and the Southerners are glad to accomodate. The blend of several ethnic groups includes Chinese, Filipinos, Germans, Greeks, French, Haitians, Hawaiians, Irish, Italians, Jews, Koreans, Lebanese, Mexicans, Pacific Islanders, Scotish, Spanish, Syrians, Vietnamese and many more, each group bringing in its unique culture.
Southerners believe they are entitled to at least two or three parties a year, in addition to Mardi Gras which tops the list as the King of Festivities. Let the good times roll.
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Editor's Corner
BIONIC EYES
We have come across one of the most astonishing scientific discoveries -- providing vision to a damaged or malfunctioning human eye. Using space technology, scientists have developed extraordinary ceramic photocells that could repair malfunctioning human eyes.
There are literally millions of Rods and Cones in the back of every healthy human eye.(slide #1&2 ) They are biological solar cells in the retina that convert light to electrical impulses. These impulses travel along the optic nerve to the brain where images are formed. Without them, we are blind. Many people are blind, or going blind, because of malfunctioning rods and cones. Retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration are examples of two such disorders. Retinitis pigmentosa tends to be hereditary, while macular degeneration mostly affects the elderly. Together, these diseases afflict millions of Americans. Both of them occur gradually and can result in total blindness.
Dr. Alex Ignatiev, a professor at the University of Houston, believes that if we could replace those damaged rods and cones with artificial ones, then a person who is retinally-blind might be able to regain some of his sight. Such thoughts, years ago, were merely wishful. But no longer. Today scientists at the Space Vaccum Epitaxy Center (SVEC) in Houston, Texas are experimenting with thin, photosensitive ceramic films that respond to light much as rods and cones do.(slide #3) Arrays of such films, they believe, could be implanted in human eyes to restore lost vision. Crafting such films is a skill SVEC scientists learned from experiments conducted
using a 12-foot diameter disk-shaped platform launched from the space shuttle. "Those experiments helped us develop the oxide (ceramic) detectors we are using now for the Bionic Eye project" said Dr. Ignatiev.
The natural layout of the detectors solves another problem that plagued earlier silicon research: blockage of nutrient flow to the eye. "All of the nutrients feeding the eye flow from the back to the front," says Dr. Ignatiev.
"If you implant a large, impervious structure (like silicon detectors) in the eye, nutrients can't flow and the eye will atrophy." The ceramic detectors are individual, five-micron-size units (the exact size of cones) that allow nutrients to flow around them.(slide #4)
The first human trials of such detectors will begin in 2002. Dr. Charles Garcia of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston will be the surgeon in charge.
James C. Stathis
Associate Editor
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