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Artificial eyes look to the future

1. Bionic eyes have been a mainstay of science fiction for decades, but now
real-world research is beginning to catch up with far-sighted storytellers. A
raft of technologies is coming to market that restore sight to people with
different kinds of vision impairment.

2. In January 2021, Israeli surgeons implanted the world’s first artificial


cornea into a bilaterally blind, 78-year-old man. When his bandages were
removed, the patient could read and recognise family members
immediately. The implant also fuses naturally to human tissue without the
recipient’s body rejecting it.
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Sweat powered smartwatches
• Engineers at the University of Glasgow have developed a  new
type of flexible supercapacitor, which stores energy, replacing
the electrolytes found in conventional batteries with sweat .
• It can be fully charged with as little as 20 microliters of fluid
and is robust enough to survive 4,000 cycles of the types of
flexes and bends it might encounter in use.
• The device works by coating polyester cellulose cloth in a thin
layer of a polymer, which acts as the supercapacitor’s
electrode.
• As the cloth absorbs its wearer’s sweat, the positive and
negative ions in the sweat interact with the polymer’s surface,
creating an electrochemical reaction which generates energy.

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