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Need better long-range vision for some friendly night-time sniping from half a mile away? Tweak it. Want one eye adjusted for distance and the other for reading? Tweak it.

Laser-refractive surgery uses wavefront technology, which was originally developed by NASA to help the focus technology on the Hubble Telescope. Now it can map out 250 points on your cornea and iris, and help repair such conditions as halos around lights at night.

Everyone from politicians to professional athletes to military men are taking advantage of the medical advancement, which in turn is helping to make laser eye surgery a commonplace prodcedure (over 20 million served worldwide).

So until we get bionic implants and augmented reality sensors in our eyes, this is the future. The question is: are you next?

[via Times Online]

Minsoung Rhee and Mark Burns created the chip, which reads binary 0s and 1s as air goes in and out of the valves. The valves are controlled by changing the air pressure in a chamber below the flowing air, which closes the valve when full. Using this system, the researchers managed to create an 8-bit system of flip-flops, logic gates, and shift registers that is more mechanical than electronic.

And because pneumatic valves are already used by the same team’s microfluidic systems on a chip, implementing the technology shouldn’t come at a great extra cost.

[via New Scientist]

The satellite will have a surface area of four square kilometers, and transmit power via microwave to a base station on Earth. Putting solar panels in space bypasses many of the difficulties of installing them on Earth: in orbit, there are no cloudy days, very few zoning laws, and the cold ambient temperature is ideal.

A small test model is scheduled for launch in 2015. To iron out all the kinks and get a fully functional system set up is estimated to take three decades. A major kink, presumably, is coping with the possible dangers when a 1-gigawatt microwave beam aimed at a small spot on Earth misses its target.

The $21 billion project just received major backing from Mitsubishi and designer IHI (in addition to research teams from 14 other countries).

[via Bloomberg via Inhabitat]

Parviz is working on a contact lens that can give visual feedback to the wearer using an embedded CPU. It can also glean data from the wearer’s eyes and transmit that data somewhere else. While the current prototype is rudimentary (read: an 8×8 pixel LED array), Parviz says you don’t need terribly complex tech to create an augmented reality interface, and thinks that with the help of laser imaging, he can create a sharp enough interface to overlay on the eye.

As for a power source for the mighty little lens, Parviz is working on solar or RF power harvesting to keep the contact lens going.

[IEEE via Slashdot]

Each Solar Road panel can develop around 7.6 kwh of power each day, and each costs around $7,000. If widely adopted, they could realistically wean the US off fossil fuels: a mile-long stretch of four-lane highway could take 500 homes off the grid. If the entire US Interstate system made use of the panels, energy would no longer be a concern for the country.

In addition, every Solar Road panel has its own microprocessor and energy management system, so if one gives out, the rest are not borked. Materials-wise, the top layer is described as translucent and high-strength. Inhabitat says it’s glass, which seems odd, especially since Solar Roadways claims the surface provides excellent traction. The base layer under the solar panel routes the power, as well as data utilities (TV, phone, Internet) to homes and power companies.

Still, this is a ways away from actual implementation, seeing as a prototype has yet to be built. But we can be excited, right?

[via Solar Roadways via Inhabitat]

The Baha (bone-anchored hearing aid) Divino, made by Cochlear, has been out for a few years now, but you can’t help but be impressed with hearing aids that come complete an adapter that lets you plug in virtually any audio source for enjoyment (an MP3 player seems the most logical, but TVs and Stereos are also possible).

The hearing aids work when titanium screws are drilled into the bone behind the ear. Then the aids are attached, which use the natural resonance of the bone to provide hearing that is 25 percent better than standard, amplified hearing aids. A digital signal processor filters noise.

The hearing aid implants cost $6,000 apiece, and last 15 years. [Sydney Morning Herald]