Injection of light-sensitive proteins restores blind man’s vision

After 40 years of blindness, a 58-year-old man can once again see images and moving objects, thanks to an injection of light-sensitive proteins into his retina. The trial is the first successful clinical test of a technique called optogenetics, which uses flashes of light to control gene expression and neuron firing. In this case, the person’s damaged photoreceptor cells were supplanted by light-sensitive bacterial proteins, delivered by a virus into cells on his retina. Special goggles simplified incoming visual information from the real world into monochromatic images, to make it more easily detected by the bacterial proteins.

Voyager 1 captures hum between the stars

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has detected persistent ripples in interstellar plasma, through which it has been travelling since it left the Solar System in 2012. By measuring these waves, astrophysicists have made the first continuous measurements of the density of interstellar plasma, the rarefied medium between the stars.

New Brain Implant Turns Visualised Letters into Text

A brain–computer interface for typing could eventually let people with paralysis communicate at the speed of their thoughts. The device was able to decode, in real time, signals from electrodes implanted in the brain of a 65-year-old man with full-body paralysis as he imagined writing. He was able to mentally type 90 characters per minute — not far from the speed at which the average person that age can type on a smartphone.

‘Spectacular’ Neanderthal find in Italy

The remains of 9 Neanderthals who died between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago have been unearthed in a cave outside Rome. According to archæologists, the Neanderthals were killed by hyenas and dragged into the cave to be devoured. The bones were found in the Guattari Cave, the site of an earlier Neanderthal discovery in 1939.

Minuscule drums push the limits of quantum weirdness

By playing two tiny drums, physicists have provided the most direct demonstration yet of quantum entanglement on larger scales. The aluminium drums are each around 10 micrometres long — barely visible to the naked eye, but enormous by quantum standards. Physicists hit the drums with microwave photons and observed that the membranes moved with such a high degree of correlation that they could no longer be described separately: they were in a quantum-entangled state. In another tiny drum experiment, physicists linked the drums’ properties — although not in perfect sync — to get around some of the measurement restrictions defined by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The findings provide evidence that quantum laws still apply in the big world and open the door to future technology built with entangled macroscopic parts.

Arabian structures predate the pyramids

More than 1,000 ancient stone structures dating back 7,000 years have been located in the north-west corner of Saudi Arabia, more than twice the number thought to exist in the area. Mustatil monuments — named after the Arabic word for rectangle — were first identified in the 1970s, but received little academic attention at the time. The structures are between 20 and 600 metres long and might have been used for rituals. If so, the area is the oldest large-scale ritual landscape in the world, predating both Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids by thousands of years.

Migration routes of ancient Australians

Scientists have traced the paths that ancient Indigenous Australians probably took as they moved through the mega continent of Sahul some 60,000 years ago. Their models suggest that the first visitors arrived on the shores of western Australia and, within 6,000 years, settled across the entire continent — from the tropical north, now Papua New Guinea, to as far south as Tasmania. Many of the ancient migration routes they modelled seem to match up closely with nineteenth century stock routes and Aboriginal trade lines.