"The bond of all friendship ... is conversation."

"When there’s a longish silence between me and my friends, it’s because someone has asked me something and are waiting for an answer.

"Then I go, 'Wait, what? Did you ask me something?' " writes Gael Hannan for the IDA Institute.

Friendships between the hearing and non-hearing present  challenges. "I know I shouldn’t feel embarrassed" in such moments, she writes, "but sometimes I just do."

"I have met people who are impatient with being asked to repeat themselves and who never quite grasp that being asked to 'speak up' is not a request to yell at me. These people and I don’t become friends because we irritate each other too much. But the people who are better than this, if they decide they like me enough to include me in their social circle, just have to be gently (or otherwise) instructed in the art of conversation with a person who has hearing loss."

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"It's our own culture and we like to share it with everybody."

Earlier this month a group of 13 blind and deaf students performed a collection of Christmas songs  at the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind’s annual "Expressions of Silence" concert, KRTV reports.

It's a school tradition: for decades, students have been entertaining crowds through signs and song.

Student performer Brandon Arensmeyer shared how he and his fellow performers express themselves through silence. “It’s like our own special thing. It’s our own culture and we like to share it with everybody,” he said.

The school's performers have taken the stage all over the country. “We’ve performed for the legislature before. We’ve traveled out of state to Washington D.C., to Salt Lake City ... we’ve performed for a variety of audiences,” said Program Director Jennifer Wasson.

The performers are in the 5th to 12th grades, and many have been expressing themselves onstage for years.

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Large eyes require increased oxygen supply.

A new international study reveals how the evolution of powerful vision was shaped by an improved oxygen supply to the eyes, Mirage News reports.

"Keen eyesight in vertebrates – from fish to birds and mammals – relies on large eyes and thick retinas. Yet the visual process is energetically costly and the high oxygen demand of thick retinas is difficult to meet by the conventional oxygen supply mechanism through blood vessels just behind the retina."

The study, published in eLife, explored the physiological requirements for the evolution of improved eyesight. The team of researchers, from 15 institutions led by the University of Aarhus and the University of Liverpool, uncovered a pattern of mechanisms to improve retinal oxygen supply.

The study looked at the eyes of 87 animal species and mapped the characteristics of their eyes onto the species’ tree of life. The researchers unraveled the evolutionary history of the eye from a 425 million-year-old extinct ancestor of modern vertebrates to current day animals.

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Heartwarming story unfolds at Hope Street office.

Officer Rodriguez of the California Highway Patrol officer was called to the DMV location on Hope Street after receiving complaints of a deaf woman who was not able to communicate with workers, KABC News reports.

Rodriguez knows American Sign Language, so he stepped in to help the woman obtain her REAL ID.

But his kindness didn't stop there. It turned out that the woman didn't have enough money to pay for the ID -- so Officer Rodriguez paid the fee out of his own pocket.

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Common mistakes that runners make.

If you’re like many runners who use glasses or contacts to correct their vision, Runner's World has some advice for you.

The magazine spoke with runner and optometrist John Womack, O.D., of Jacksonville, Florida, to get learn about some of the mistakes you might be making and how to take care of your eyes.

Womack says there are four basic mistakes that runners make.

The first is simple: wearing your everyday glasses when you run. Glasses that block out UV rays are a must, he says.

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Deaf servants were favored companions of the sultan.

In the 1600s, some 40 deaf servants were employed by the Ottoman court in Constantinople, writes Amelia Soth in JSTOR Daily.

They were specifically chosen because of their deafness. These servants were favored companions of the sultan; their facility in nonverbal communication made them indispensable to the court, because decorum restricted speech in the sultan’s presence. 

The deaf attendants taught pages to communicate through signs. A European observer, Ottaviano Bon, wrote that “both the Grand Signor, and divers that are about him, can reason, and discourse with the Mutes of any thing: as well and as distinctly, alla Mutescha, by nods and signes, as they can with words.”

Silence and seclusion were a way to express the sultan’s majesty to his people and to visitors from foreign countries.

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Study finds autism 30 times more common among blind people.

​As a child neurologist, Ruben Jure treats children with developmental disabilities including autism.

As director of the Centro Privado de Neurología y Neuropsicología Infanto-Juvenil Wernicke in Argentina, he writes in Spectrum News that every year he sees at least one blind child who shows the full clinical manifestations of autism.

He decided to investigate the relationship between autism and blindness, and although the study was small, he writes, "it indicated that autism is more than 30 times as common in blind people as in sighted people."

"Other work from my team suggests this relationship is specific to vision," he writes. "Hearing impairment is not strongly connected to autism."

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ASL is now the third most commonly taught language at U.S. colleges.

For the first time, ASL is being offered at Cornell University, meeting its three-semester world language requirement, the Cornell Chronicle reports.

ASL came to Cornell after a lobbying effort by the student-run Cornell University Deaf Awareness Project.

In 2018 the faculty changed its definition of “language” to include signed languages, and that allowed ASL to fulfill the foreign language requirement.

According to the Modern Language Association, ASL is now the third most commonly taught language at colleges and universities (other than English), after Spanish and French. 

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