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"Three Blind Mice" is an old children’s tune, but a team of scientists have taken it seriously: they discovered a chemical that temporarily restores some vision to blind mice. This could someday allow people with degenerative blindness to see again.

Because the chemical eventually wears off, it may offer a safer alternative to other experimental approaches for restoring sight, such as gene or stem cell therapies, which permanently change the retina.
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Anne Strieber learned that we use a specific part of the brain to tell time. A new study finds that the part of the brain we use for reading doesn’t require vision at all: Brain imaging studies of blind people as they read words in Braille show activity in the same part of the brain that lights up when sighted readers read.read more

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Eating too much monosodium glutamate, which is used in many Chinese foods and processed foods, could make you go blind. Researchers at Hirosaki University in Japan found that rats fed on diets high in MSG have vision loss and thinner retinas.

MSG binds to receptors on retinal cells, destroying them and reducing the ability of the remaining cells to relay electrical signals to the brain. Researcher Hiroshi Ohguro says large amounts of MSG were used, up to 20% of the total diet in the group with the most eye damage. “Lesser amounts should be OK,” he says. “But the precise borderline amount is still unknown.”
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