Halloween tempts many to use dangerous lenses.

Leah Carpenter, 17, a Michigan high school senior, bought a $26 pair of colored contact lenses last weekend at a public market, USA Today reports. Now she is partially blind in her right eye.

“It was just for show. That was our theme for the day,”  she said. “I wasn’t thinking anything would go wrong.”

But the decorative lens scratched her cornea, causing severe pain and limiting her school and extracurricular activities.

Contact lenses are considered to be medical devices and are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Selling them without a prescription is against the law.

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88-year-old British man fulfills a lifelong dream.

John Cramond lost his sight as a young boy, BBC News reports, and never had a chance to get behind the wheel until last weekend.

He told local disability volunteer co-ordinator Bill Milven about his desire to have the experience of driving. Milven found a driving instructor with a dual control vehicle, and they hatched a plan to take Cramond to a war-time airstrip where he spent an hour behind the wheel.

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Lenses may restore poor eyesight, cure cataracts.

A postgraduate at the University of Leeds in the UK is developing a liquid crystal eye lens that could restore eyesight in middle-aged adults, Medical Daily reports.

Devesh Mistry has created implantable artificial lenses by manipulating liquid crystal, the same material found in smartphone and TV screens. The synthetic lens replaces the diseased one and also automatically adjusts its focus, directed by the eye's muscle movements.

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Riverside campus undergoing major overhaul.

The 60-acre campus of the California School for the Deaf has undergone some renovations over the past 50 years, but nothing like what's going on today, the Riverside Press Enterprise reports.

“This is the first major overhaul of the campus,” Scott Kerby, the school’s interim superintendent, told the Press Enterprise. “After 50 years you can only renovate so much.”

One of two state schools for the deaf, the Riverside campus was established in 1953 and serves 11 Southern California counties.

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 Australian team applies insect model to bionic eyes.

In research published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, scientists have used a computer program mimicking dragonfly eyes to create a bionic eye for humans, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The eye would use “a retinal implant connected to a video camera to convert images into electrical impulses that will carry signals back to the brain.” 

The researchers, based at the University of Adelaide, also foresee using the technology in driverless cars. Steven Wiederman, the neurologist who heads the research team, says they chose to emulate vision in dragonflies vision rather than humans because it would take too long to unravel the complexities of human vision.
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Kids are spending too much time indoors.

Short-sightedness (myopia) is reaching epidemic proportions, anew study warns, and nearly one billion people could go blind by 2050, according to researchers at the Brien Holden Vision Institute in Australia.

Health Newsline reports that around five billion people, or half the world’s population, will be myopic by the middle of the century.
Of the total myopia sufferers, up to one-fifth, or 1 billion, may be at significantly increased risk of blindness.

Professor Kovin Naidoo, the lead author of the study, says children should spend at least two hours a day playing outside. Parents "should also ensure children don’t spend too much time on electronic devices, such as tablets, mobile phones, electronic games, television and other activities which requires them to focus close up for long periods,” he advises.

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