Friday Delights

Vision to the Blind, Politics and Chaos, History of Inventions

This week we are starting with some amazing news coming from the field of biotech. Researchers working in Melbourne have produced a device that can restore vision to blind people, using a microscopic camera and electrodes implanted in the brain. The device will be able to completely bypass the optical nerve, effectively ignoring any damage that it has suffered. Human trials are expected to start soon.

While science seems to be taking us into the future with giant leaps, one look at the state of global politics is enough to make you ask yourself if we’re not just going to descend into chaos. This is just what this model predicts. The authors, who claim to have predicted the rise of Trump, now predict that we are heading for even more turmoil in the US and globally.

Speaking about political turmoil, I have finally started looking into what is going on in Belarus. I have to admit, I still don’t have a clear grasp of the current dynamics. However, I found a fascinating article about how, just 10 years ago, Lukashenko hired a UK company to fix the PR of the country and make it more likeable in the west. If that sounds fucked up to you, that’s because it is. But hey, there is nothing stopping private businesses from helping dictators become more likeable.

I have always been fascinated with the history of technology. Although we sometimes imagine that technology evolved in a series of discreet inventions, each of them attributable to a single genius inventor, this is almost never the case. One example of that is the invention of the lightbulb. It is widely attributed to Thomas Edison but that is really far away from the full picture.

A lot of times technology is innovated out of necessity. A perfect example of this is the ventilator, the simple (and not so simple) device that keeps patients breathing even if they can’t do it themselves. Our biggest problem in 2020 has been that we don’t have enough of the things in the right places. However, only 70 years ago, they didn’t even exist. And still, they were direly needed. This is an amazing story of innovation, bravery and being in the right place at the right time.

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This week’s extra video is Maria Konnikova talking about how to remove emotions from the thought process, part of her interview with The Knowledge Project