Graffiti Project in Kenya Slums — more than a year after he took the original pictures, French photo artist JR has returned to Kibera, Kenya. He was reunited with the women who had accepted to be part of his WOMEN project at the end of 2007 (previously). 2000 square meters of Kibera slum rooftops have been covered with photos of their eyes and faces. Most of the women will have their own photos on their own rooftop and the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. They are on view from the railway line that passes above them, and will be visible for Google Earth. (via Africa.Visual_Media)
posted by netbros on Apr 8, 2009 - 11 comments

Bernt Aune's corneas are 123 years old, which possibly makes them the oldest living human tissue on record. [more inside]
posted by andeles on Oct 30, 2008 - 27 comments

So you want to look like an anime character? Because wide eyes are more attractive, and, ahem, easier. And blue eyes are more attractive, but only to blue-eyed men. [more inside]
posted by orthogonality on Aug 11, 2008 - 32 comments

How do things look to colorblind people? Colour Lovers (Prev: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - all more useful to those who aren't colorblind) offers some popular websites and iconic art, As Seen By The Color Blind. Luckily humans are smart and have created technology like the Color Blind Web Page Filter. Prev. Wiki.
posted by allkindsoftime on Jul 25, 2008 - 36 comments

A University of Chicago doctoral candidate has shown that the evolution of the flatfish was much more gradual than previously thought.
posted by chuckdarwin on Jul 10, 2008 - 21 comments

The day has a thousand eyes, as well.... (via)
posted by Kronos_to_Earth on May 27, 2008 - 10 comments

A fish with forward facing eyes has been discovered in Indonesia. [more inside]
posted by chuckdarwin on Apr 3, 2008 - 47 comments

Novel techniques in the making of stop-motion short Madame Tutli-Putli. And the movie itself (alternate link).
posted by Wolfdog on Feb 5, 2008 - 9 comments

Eyescapes by Rankin [nsfw]. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Feb 3, 2008 - 33 comments

The allure of blue eyes has long been celebrated. In the Odyssey, Homer gives the goddess Athena "bright blue eyes," and our fascination persists to this day with actors like Brad Pitt and Naomi Watts. Until recently, however, no one could explain the phenomena. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll on Feb 2, 2008 - 38 comments

THX for the eyes. [more inside]
posted by brownpau on Jan 29, 2008 - 53 comments

Doctors in London have made the world's first attempt to treat a retinal degeneration disorder using gene therapy. "The researchers aim to restore the activity in these cells and therefore restore vision by implanting healthy copies of the key gene into the RPE at the back of the eye. In other optical news, wired.com is leading with a piece about "Luke 's Binoculars" (yes, as in Skywalker) - a gadget that is meant to provide soldiers with a 120-degree field of view and allow him/her to be able to spot moving vehicles as far as 10 kilometers away by integrating EEG electrodes that monitor the wearer's neural signals. CTTWS, I presume?
posted by chuckdarwin on May 1, 2007 - 6 comments

Iridology may be bogus science, but it appears that the eyes really could windows to the soul as Swedish researchers reveal it may be possible to read a person's personality from their irises.
posted by electricinca on Feb 19, 2007 - 14 comments

Okay, here it is in all it's glory: googlyeyesoncock.com is once again filled with googly-eyed cock. (seriously NSFW!)
posted by TheCoug on Aug 22, 2006 - 55 comments

Not settled after all partial genetic explaination of eye color. it's not one classic dominant/recessive allele a la the monk Mendel. three known + unknown genes involved, everybody's still beautiful.
posted by longsleeves on Dec 8, 2005 - 19 comments

It was just horrifying how quickly they became what I told them they were. The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, Jane Elliott, a elementary school teacher in Riceville, Iowa, conducted her Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise with her students, dividing them by eye color to ilustrate prejudice and racism. Since retiring from teaching in the early 1980s she's repeated the exercise for adults in corporations, at colleges, and on Oprah.

PBS's 1985 documentary A Class Divided is viewable online [Real and Windows Media], as are parts of the 2002 documentary Australian Eye [QuickTime and Windows Media]; both feature participants' reactions. (Related: different reflections by a participants in similar exercises; and a program evaluation and transcript of the exercise.)

Ms. Elliott recently said, "What is distressing is that I get the same results today with adults that I got using the exercise with children in 1968."
posted by kirkaracha on Jun 13, 2005 - 64 comments

Have you checked your humors today? Not the gunky jelly stuff in people's eyes, the other kind.

Are you melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, or choleric? Are you a salamander, gnome, nymph or sylph? Earth, water, air or fire? Elf, Ninja, Pirate or Dwarf? (arrrr! buckets of blood! flagons of phlegm and barrels of black bile!)

If nothing else, the theory of humors adds to one's arcane vocabulary.
posted by Capn on Mar 23, 2005 - 16 comments

Surgical Eyes - source of info about complications and their treatment from Lasik and other vision correction surgeries.
posted by Gyan on Jan 31, 2005 - 35 comments

At first glance it would seem to be something one would find in some photoshop gallery. But then one finds out that she has been forced to justify her work, for they are pictures of freshly killed animals. Much to the dislike of some craigslistians. With the growing uproar, there is even a petition going around (though petitions like that are hardly rare.) Is this a work of someone seeking attention through offending people? Or someone unable to use photoshop? Whatever the case, I’m sure PETA will join in. . . . Wait, it has.
posted by TwelveTwo on Jan 10, 2005 - 90 comments

MetaFilter: Stop it or you'll go blind.
Heavy computer users risk glaucoma - Toho University study.
posted by soyjoy on Nov 16, 2004 - 21 comments

"If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."
posted by homunculus on Oct 2, 2004 - 12 comments

'Laser vision' offers new insights Directly spraying light onto the retina, basically a heads-up display on your eye. And it's a step closer to the sunglasses Chevette stole in Virtual Light. Said glasses being wired up to display metadata about the world around you -- if you have a gardener set you walk through and look at the plants and everything has little labels with the common names and names in Latin.
posted by artlung on Apr 30, 2004 - 5 comments

Laser-o-vision: A system that projects light beams directly into the eye could change the way we see the world.
posted by moonbird on Apr 27, 2004 - 18 comments

Eyeball Jewelry This just caught my eye (Sorry!). It's jewelry that is implanted INTO your EYE! I think this is pretty cool and another milestone in body modding. Discuss how long until Georgia legislators ban this.
posted by Fantt on Apr 7, 2004 - 21 comments

Seeing with sound.
A researcher in the Netherlands has developed a system that converts pictures from a head-mounted camera into highly complex soundscapes, which are then piped to the user via headphones. After only a week of use, a woman who has been blind from birth can tell a CD from a floppy, and discern whether the lights are on or off. Not quite up to either a bat and/or Daredevil standards, but very cool nonetheless.
posted by Irontom on Oct 14, 2003 - 5 comments

The gift of sight is easy to take for granted. Not for Mike May, blinded in infancy, Mike had partial vision restored at the age of 43. This is his journal, written with infectious delight for his new gift and documenting the unexpected problems that the miracle brings. There's much, much more to vision than just the data and Mike is an unprecedented opportunity to better understand how perception works. [via the Guardian and previously mentioned here]
posted by grahamwell on Aug 26, 2003 - 14 comments

You will obey your crazy-eyes-red-spiral overlords. Contact lenses for those who would like to escape the quaint simplicity of the iris. (*The eye can also be valuable advertising space. Put your favorite NFL logo right around your pupil! […scroll to bottom of page...]) More styles here (flash, with really bad music.)
posted by limitedpie on Jul 31, 2003 - 9 comments

Matthew's Eye has been healing ever since he got a nasty shot from someone. His site shows the process through a series of photos, one taken per day.
posted by dum2007 on May 16, 2003 - 18 comments

'Bionic eye' breakthrough can allow the blind to see. One by one the miracles of Jesus are replaced by science.
posted by The Jesse Helms on May 8, 2003 - 15 comments

Re-Shape Your Eyes While You Sleep? Wow - I don't know about you, but if I could wear contacts during my sleep that I *took out* when I woke up and didn't have to wear any all day, and I could see, then I'd do it in a second. When will it become reasonably priced?
posted by djspicerack on Sep 26, 2002 - 25 comments

Medical professionals are supposed to tell the truth. But why do they always lie?

I had an exam yesterday and they lied to me again as they always do.

Every time they do the glaucoma test, I have been told that they will get "close" to the eye. I correct them and tell them, no, you're going to touch it. They'll deny it 3 or 4 times before finally conceding that they'll "barely touch it" or something like that.

"The most common way to currently measure pressure inside the eye is tonometry. In air tonometry, a short burst of air hits the cornea. In applanation tonometry, a doctor anesthetizes the eye, then presses against it with a tiny instrument and measures the depth of the indentation." (sorry-- this is where I got the quote-- it's mostly about something else-- even web pages are reluctant to admit they'll touch your eyeball).

I have never recieved air tonometry, it's rarely used and considerred inaccurate.

This only bugs me because years ago a doctor told me he was going to get close to my eye, I could feel him on the surface through the aneshthetic and pulled back. This happened repeatedly. Eventually he told me he had to touch the eye. If he had told me that in the first place, I wouldn't have thought he was screwing up and I wouldn't have pulled back.

Well ok, it also bugs me that a doctor would utter such an obvious lie (you can feel them on the eye and see the cornea distort when it's pressed). What else are they lying about? What are their motives? (I have contacts, I touch my eyeballs all the time, surely they don't think I have an eyeball touching phobia...)
posted by squinky on May 31, 2002 - 31 comments

The mind's eye becomes literal as a potential cure for Parkinsons.
posted by srboisvert on Apr 19, 2002 - 7 comments

Poke Alex in the Eye! Disclaimer: This site copyright ©2001 Colby Cheese Works. What does that mean to you, the viewer and eye-poking enthusiast? Basically it means that all images, words, sounds, ideas, eyeballs, fingers, donuts, virtual rabbit's feet, wires with lint on them, spinning heads, soda cans, HTML, PHP, Javascript, varicose veins, 14th century Italian sculptures, battleships, thermonuclear devices, dark matter, wormholes, kittens, interdimensional rifts, temporal anomalies, and/or lost galaxies are protected under federal law.
posted by acridrabbit on Apr 12, 2002 - 10 comments

Scientists in the USA have discovered [NYTimes] a new cell in the eye responsible for resetting the biological clock. Its being called "heretical".. Not every day, Dr. Provencio said, do scientists find a new body function.
posted by stbalbach on Feb 8, 2002 - 3 comments

Woman glues child's eye shut ...I knew there was a reason for my paranoia. I hated (and still hate) eye drops.
posted by Greener on Jan 4, 2002 - 40 comments

Your eyes never stop moving. Even though we are rarely aware of them, our eye movements are incredibly complex. They are also very informative. Eye movement data is being used to study painters painting, art lovers loving art, drivers driving, musicians sight reading, and speakers speaking, not to mention the cognitive science staples of reading and scene viewing. One interesting application of eye movement data is the Eyetrack2000 project, which attempts to describe the eye movement behavior of people viewing news websites in order to improve web page design. Some of the findings suggest that the internet and print media are different in important ways: on the web, text is fixated before pictures; in print, pictures are fixated first.
posted by iceberg273 on Oct 24, 2001 - 10 comments

I can see you... (NY Times Science Tuesday) So it turns out that the eyeless brittlestar can see because its entire skeleton is essentially an eye. That makes me wonder -- what if one could see with other parts of one's body? What if one's skin was covered in microlenses? It would make showering more interesting, that's for sure.
posted by meep on Sep 4, 2001 - 5 comments

Cool eyeball science Quick summary of interesting research on the output of the eyeball. 3 really cool things: 1, we know much more about the output of the eyeball now than a few years ago; 2, they've got a neural network doing visual processing like the eye; 3, most of what you see your brain makes up!
posted by daver on Mar 28, 2001 - 8 comments