Eyesight

SAN DIEGO - In the ocean off Coronado, a Navy team has discovered a relic worthy of display in a military museum: a torpedo of the kind deployed in the late 19th century, considered a technological marvel in its day. But don't look for the primary discoverers to get a promotion or an invitation to meet the admirals at the Pentagon - although they might get an extra fish for dinner or maybe a pat on the snout. The so-called Howell torpedo was discovered by bottlenose dolphins being trained by the Navy to find undersea objects, including mines, that not even billion-dollar technology can detect.

The digital doctor will see you now. Just pull out your smartphone. Want to track your blood pressure? Make checking your pulse as easy as saying "cheese"? Figure out your eyeglasses prescription or diagnose an ear infection? "The smartphone is effectively becoming a scientific instrument," says Frank Moss of the MIT Media Lab. With modern high-resolution screens and powerful computing ability, the smartphone can perform tests that previously required a doctor's visit. And more cheaply.

Italian and British scientists want to exhume the body of astronomer Galileo Galilei for DNA tests to determine if severe vision problems may have affected some of his findings. Galileo, who lived from 1564 to 1642, had eye problems in the second half of his life and was blind for his last two years. Dr. Peter Watson, president of the Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis, suspects Galileo may have had an inflammation of the eye's middle layer, a condition called creeping angle closure glaucoma.

Children who play more outdoors are smarter, leaner and stronger than kids more inclined toward indoor activities, and a new study finds they have another advantage: They're less likely to suffer from nearsightedness, in which objects in the distance appear blurry. The study , presented Monday at the American Academy of Ophthamology's  yearly meeting, culled the findings of eight studies that explored the relationship between outdoor time and myopia in more than 10,000 children.

The government cautioned consumers Tuesday not to expect a new type of tinted glasses produced by a Tustin manufacturer to cure colorblindness, but the company says it can help a lot. ColorMax Technologies Inc. won Food and Drug Administration approval earlier this month to sell tinted prescription eyeglasses to aid people who cannot properly distinguish shades of red or green from other colors. The company's stock price has more than doubled since the Dec.

Is there an epidemic of myopia among kids? Some experts think so, and they point to the many hours that some children spend in front of a computer doing homework or playing Nintendo. "Children have to constantly refocus their eyes when they're using a computer, which can be very taxing," says Cary Herzberg, a Chicago optometrist. "Our eyes aren't designed to do all this close work."

Fetal cell transplants and electronic sensors may eventually help restore partial vision in people whose light-sensitive retinal cells have been destroyed by diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, researchers said in Los Angeles on Sunday. In such diseases, which affect at least 1.8 million Americans, nerve pathways from the eye to the brain are functional. Only the eye's ability to detect light is impaired.

After two years of treatment in her native Mexico, toddler Gretel Arellanes had lost one eye to cancer, and a doctor told her mother there was little they could do to save the other. Two-year-old Gretel has retinoblastoma, a rare cancer, and chemotherapy had proven unsuccessful at fighting the tumor in her second eye. A few weeks ago, Dr. A. Linn Murphree, director of ocular oncology at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles, received a call from Gretel's doctor in Sonora, hoping Murphree could help.

OK, bang the drum slowly, professor. Muffle the cymbals and the laugh track. You might say that Old Blue Eye is back. But that's as funny as this is going to get. I feel I owe my friends an explanation as to where I've been all these weeks. Believe me, I would rather have been in a press box. I lost an old friend the other day. He was blue-eyed, impish, he cried a lot with me, saw a great many things with me. I don't know why he left me. Boredom, perhaps.

Pete Rose found baseball, at its essence, to be a simple game. "See the ball," he said. "Hit the ball." And nobody did that more often than Rose, the sports' all-time hits leader. But what if you can't see the ball? That happened to Baltimore Orioles outfielder Jay Gibbons. "My vision just went on me all of a sudden," he said. "I was screwed." Same thing with Oakland's Dan Johnson, who accidentally sprayed sunscreen into his right eye last spring and wound up with double vision.

A 35-year-old parolee has filed a claim against the city of El Monte and its Police Department alleging that he lost much of his eyesight after he was beaten by officers. Cornelio David Chavez, 35, was involved in a violent altercation June 24 with several El Monte police officers who were trying to arrest him on an outstanding warrant, police said. Brad Gage, Chavez's attorney, alleged in a claim against the city that Chavez was handcuffed and beaten by officers. A claim is typically a precursor to a lawsuit.

Flashy lasers get much of the attention in vision-correcting surgery, but they can't fix severe shortsightedness. For those wearing the thickest glasses, a newer procedure provides better eyesight with less risk of vision loss, according to a recent study. In this alternative procedure, surgeons insert a new lens inside the eye, behind the colored iris. It's like a contact lens that sits inside the eye. In a May 12 review by the nonprofit Cochrane Collaboration, which analyzes healthcare data, the authors reported that internal contacts make people in the middle-to-high range of shortsightedness happier with their vision than does Lasik.

For children diagnosed with worsening myopia, bifocals might be a better choice than standard lenses for nearsightedness; researchers have found that the condition doesn't seem to progress as rapidly among bifocal-wearing children. Those findings, released Monday, raise the intriguing question of whether there is a better way to treat myopia early in its course, slowing its typical progression. The condition, in which near vision is clear but distance vision is blurry, is usually identified in childhood and worsens until late adolescence.

For an increasing number of Americans, life's a blur. That's according to a population-based study published Monday showing that rates of myopia -- difficulty seeing distant objects -- are soaring. The trend is matched in many other countries, causing eye doctors to wonder what could be causing the decline in human vision. Some suspect both an increase in our close-up work time (think computer use) and a decrease in time spent outdoors. Researchers at the National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, found that rates of myopia -- also called nearsightedness -- in people ages 12 to 54 increased from 25% in 1971-72 to 41.6% in 1999-2004.

Pennsylvania researchers using gene therapy have made significant improvements in vision in 12 patients with a rare inherited visual defect, a finding that suggests it may be possible to produce similar improvements in a much larger number of patients with retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. The team last year reported success with three adult patients, an achievement that was hailed as a major accomplishment for gene therapy. They have now treated an additional nine patients, including five children, and find that the best results are achieved in the youngest patients, whose defective retinal cells have not had time to die off. The youngest patient, 9-year-old Corey Haas, was considered legally blind before the treatment began.

Add vision protection to exercise's list of benefits. In two new analyses based on the National Runners' Health Study, one found that people who ran an average of 2 to 4 kilometers a day (1 mile equals 1.6 kilometers) had a 19% decrease in their risk of age-related macular degeneration, when compared with people who ran less than 2 kilometers per day. Those who ran more than 4 kilometers per day had a 42% to 54% decrease in risk.

For children diagnosed with worsening myopia, bifocals might be a better choice than standard lenses for nearsightedness; researchers have found that the condition doesn't seem to progress as rapidly among bifocal-wearing children. Those findings, released Monday, raise the intriguing question of whether there is a better way to treat myopia early in its course, slowing its typical progression. The condition, in which near vision is clear but distance vision is blurry, is usually identified in childhood and worsens until late adolescence.

Call it the hidden side of the Lasik juggernaut: a patient who suffers sight-threatening complications after laser eye surgery, a center that engages in what one couple regards as "bait and switch" tactics, and several California surgeons who reused disposable blades without sterilizing them between patients.

Italian and British scientists want to exhume the body of astronomer Galileo Galilei for DNA tests to determine if severe vision problems may have affected some of his findings. Galileo, who lived from 1564 to 1642, had eye problems in the second half of his life and was blind for his last two years. Dr. Peter Watson, president of the Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis, suspects Galileo may have had an inflammation of the eye's middle layer, a condition called creeping angle closure glaucoma.

All eye doctor Natalia Uribe needed was five seconds. But her patient, Julia Bailey, was two days shy of her first birthday and had an infinitesimal attention span. Uribe wiggled a toy duck in front of Judith's eyes with one hand and held a vision prism with the other. Judith squirmed, giggled and finally focused on the toy, giving Uribe her fleeting opportunity to determine if the infant favored one eye over the other.