Inside your eye are tiny retinal cells whose job is to translate the visual signals you encounter every day – colors and edges – into signals your brain can understand. Without these photoreceptors, you can’t see. And retinal degeneration, in which these receptors start to die off, is one of the leading causes of blindness. But one group of scientists may be nearing a solution. In a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine this week, researchers describe a tiny, honeycomb-shaped wireless implant that helps restore vision in rats with retinal degeneration.
