Acuity in Biological News

Taste, odor intervention improves cancer therapy, according to Virginia Tech, Wake Forest study

... report altered sensory perception, such as decreased or lost taste acuity or metallic taste. Altered sensory perception causes psychological anxiety ... taste alteration. Findings from these studies showed changes in taste acuity are dependent on the site of the tumor with head and neck patients ...

Right breakfast bread keeps blood sugar in check all day

... of satiety. Anne Nilsson also studied the connection between mental acuity and blood sugar levels after meals. Trial subjects were given experimental ... high GI, respectively, and afterwards they were asked to perform mental acuity tests. It turned out that subjects who had eaten low GI breakfasts could ...

Fried purple tomatoes

... disease and age-related degenerative diseases. There is evidence that anthocyanins also have anti-inflammatory activity, promote visual acuity and hinder obesity and diabetes. Tomatoes already contain high levels of the antioxidant lycopene. Highly processed tomatoes are the best ...

Brain tweak lets sleep-deprived flies stay sharp

... people awake, but they're addictive and lose their effectiveness with repeated use. This research should help us find methods for maintaining mental acuity that have more specific effects, are less addictive and retain their potency." The results appear in Current Biology on Aug. 5. Shaw's lab ...

Wake up and smell the sweat

... Women were generally slightly more sensitive to many smells than men, and some individuals of both sexes were better or worse in across-the-board acuity to all odorants. Finally (as is always the case), not all was in the genes environmental factors were seen to play a role as well. ...

Device helps patients survive, regain function til transplant

... 18 patients who died before leaving the hospital, show that serious complications do occur even with the newer generation of device due to the acuity of illness of these patients. Many patients experienced bleeding related to blood-thinning drugs used with the device. But nearly all patients ...

Action video games sharpen vision 20 percent

... percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics. In ... amblyopic patients, may also be able to gain an increase in their visual acuity with special rehabilitation software that reproduces an action game's need ...

Tracking sperm whales and jumbo squid

... time. However, he added, at depths of 800 feet or more, where it’s very cold and oxygen levels are extremely low, the squid’s reaction time, visual acuity and swimming speed may be significantly impaired because of an inadequate supply of oxygen—a condition known as hypoxia. "Squid need a constant ...

Compound eyes, evolutionary ties

... units in each of its 800 unit eyes, an evolutionary change to an "open system" that enabled insects to make significant improvements in visual acuity and angular sensitivity. In contrast, beetles (shown surrounding the fruit fly), bees and many mosquito species have the light-gathering units fused ...

Results with newer bladeless LASIK equivalent to standard microkeratome LASIK

... laser. "At six months after surgery, there are no differences between the eyes that had bladeless or microkeratome LASIK with respect to visual acuity (vision as measured by reading an eye chart), contrast sensitivity (ability to discriminate bright objects from dark objects), or in perception of ...

Scientists discover why cornea is transparent and free of blood vessels, allowing vision

... vision would be significantly impaired," he says, adding that clear, vessel-free corneas are vital to any animal that needs a high level of visual acuity to survive. The cornea, one of only a few tissues in the body that actively keep themselves vessel-free (the other is cartilage), is the thin ...

MIT 'seeing machine' offers hope to blind

... pilot clinical trial of the seeing machine involved visually impaired people recruited from the Beetham Eye Institute. All participants had a visual acuity of 20/70 or less in the better-seeing eye. A person with 20/70 vision can see nothing smaller than the third line from the top of most eye charts. ...