A few feet inside the unassuming front door at Science Corp. in Alameda, California, lies a brightly lit room with large, transparent windows. On a late November afternoon, three gowned surgeons carefully circle a New Zealand white rabbit laid out on an ocean-blue cloth. About a month prior, the rabbit — named Leela, after Futurama’s one-eyed heroine — received an injection through the white of her eyeball.
Just outside the surgery room, Max Hodak, the CEO of Science Corp., stands in jeans and a black hoodie, cradling a laptop in the crook of his arm. The presentation on his screen shows a small device, about the size of a penny, attached to a thin tail of wiring. It’s a device he hopes can restore a critical sense and help the blind see again. It doesn’t look like much — a miniature city of electronics attached to a microLED display just 2mm square — but it doesn’t have to.
The prosthesis he’s showing off is known as the Science Eye, and once it’s been proved safe and effective, it’ll be implanted on top of, and inside, the eyeballs of human patients suffering from diseases where the eye’s light-sensing cells have died. The idea is to coax other cells within the eye to receive and translate light signals. The device was unveiled as the biotech exited stealth on Nov. 21 last year.
It had been a busy morning for Hodak, but an air of quiet optimism suffused the Science facility during my visit. In the months since, the company’s first scientific paper was uploaded to bioRxiv, a repository for preprint scientific articles, describing the extensive foundational work Science Corp. has undertaken, including demonstrating how its technology works in rabbits like Leela, and readying it for future trials to test its vision-restoring capabilities.
As I stand with Hodak outside the surgery, he runs through images on his laptop, pointing out the form factor of the Science Eye and how many pixels the team has been able to jam into the device’s wafer-thin microLED. The number stands at an impressive 16,000, allowing for a resolution he says is about “eight times better than an iPhone 13.” He shows off a brief demo of the kind of “vision” someone with a Science Eye might have. Red pixels dance around a screen, recapitulating a view of a street and a human waving their hands.
The microLED device, which Science calls FlexLED, is just one component of the Science Eye. For it to restore even this form of vision to patients, the Science team first needs to deliver a gene to a specific region of the eye and demonstrate it can generate electrical signals in the regions of the brain responsible for controlling sight. That’s where Leela comes in.
While Hodak and co-founder Alan Mardinly explain the process to me, behind them, Leela’s eyeball is carefully being removed from its socket.
TO READ THIS article, your eye and your brain are involved in a frantic dance, enlivened by a storm of light and electrical signals. This dance, honed by millions of years of evolution, provides us with the sensation of sight.
Light from your screen is focused by the lens of your eye onto the retina, a layer of tissue at the rear of the eye containing light-sensing cells known as photoreceptors. These cells, which are shaped like rods and cones, contain molecules known as opsins, which can convert the incoming light into an electrical signal.
That signal is eventually passed forward to nerve cells called retinal ganglion cells, which snake from the eye up into the brain as the optic nerve, transmitting information that creates a visual image of the world.
In genetic diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration, abnormalities in the layer of photoreceptors in the retina ultimately lead to their death. With the photoreceptors lost, light signals can no longer be translated to electrical signals, resulting in blindness. It’s not a perfect analogy, but think of the eye like a house. There’s still electricity flowing into the wires of the home, but with these diseases, all the lightbulbs have blown out.
The FlexLED sits at the back of the eye, while the electronics package sits on top of the eyeball in the same way a glaucoma shunt might.
Zooey Liao/CNET
Fortunately, there are other ways to light it up. While the photoreceptors are lost in retinitis pigmentosa, the RGCs — and other cells in the retina — remain intact. The brain can still decode light signals. The idea behind the Science Eye is to modify these RGCs to become photoreceptive so they can be stimulated, by light, and send those signals to the brain. It’s like bringing lamps into the house and plugging them in to provide light.
The modification requires an injection of a specially designed opsin, which has been genetically manipulated and encased in a deactivated virus to seek out RGCs. The Science team has been able to show that the opsin makes its way to RGCs, in experiments with neurons derived from stem cells and in retinal organoids, simulacra of a human retina. In short, they can illuminate the house with lamps, rather than lightbulbs.
“What we want to do is test it in an adult human … but we can’t until we’re allowed to,” says Alan Mardinly, a Science co-founder and its director of biology. “The next best thing is to grow a retina and test it in those human cells.”
The organoids, which develop from stem cells into a mixture of cells including RGCs, are doused in a solution of the viral construct containing opsins. About 10 weeks later they’re placed under a microscope, where researchers, including cell engineer Kevin Smith, go searching for bright red cells — signifying that the opsin has landed in the organoid’s RGCs. I’m told this is working well, with about one in five RGCs expressing the construct designed by Science. Further refinement of the viral construct and the opsin is expected to deliver even better expression.
This work at the lab bench shows that the method works in vitro, outside of a living organism. But what about inside a living organism? For that, Science needs Leela. More specifically, it needs her eyes.
AS I WANDER through the laboratories at Science with Hodak and Mardinly, I pass by scientist Amy Rochford as she works with tweezers and a paintbrush to delicately manipulate a thumbnail-size piece of tissue.
This, she tells me, is Leela’s eyeball.
Rochford slices it open, removing various parts of the eye, like the lens and the vitreous, a gel-like layer in the middle, before spreading the ocular orb open like a flower with four petals. The paintbrush helps access the retina and delicately sections it out for processing, so another member of the Science team — someone like cell engineer Smith — can study it down the lens of a microscope.
Rabbit eyes aren’t quite the same as human eyes. One of the chief differences is a region known as the fovea, a central depression in the retina where a lot of light-sensitive cones are packed tightly together. Rabbits have a streak of cells whereas humans have a pit, Mardinly notes, and the fundamental eye biology is a little different, but the New Zealand Whites provide a great starting point for this kind of research.
The rods and cones in a rabbit’s retina at 4,000x magnification.
Getty Images
Science needs to validate two concepts. First, its viral construct, containing the opsin, has to get into RGCs in the rabbit retina. Second, the pulsing light of the FlexLED device needs to stimulate the opsins and send signals to the brain. In rabbits, Science isn’t trying to restore vision just yet. Rather, it’s doing the basic science to show the method works.
Early results indicate it does. Experiments with two rabbits, described in a preprint the team released in February, show they’ve been able to make RGCs light-sensitive. They’ve also been able to pulse the FlexLED device and detect activity in the visual centers of the brain.
However, to stimulate the opsin in RGCs, patients (including Science’s rabbits) need to be exposed to a specific wavelength of light. The opsin doesn’t respond to natural light like the human eye; it’s unable to generate a full picture of the environment like healthy photoreceptor cells can. For that reason, the Eye will require patients to wear a pair of glasses with cameras that communicate information, wirelessly via infrared, to the FlexLED implanted over the retina.
The vision restoration for early patients won’t be a miraculous return to 20/20, but it will help them make sense of their world; the sensation will be akin to sight but with much less fidelity.
To restore high-resolution vision, there are physiological barriers that have yet to be overcome. For instance, the human retina contains more than 100 million photoreceptors in each eye, but only about 1 million RGCs, a difference that’s hard to overcome — but not impossible. In some ways, it might even be considered easier to stimulate just the RGCs and get them to fire.
Patients would be required to wear glasses that communicate wirelessly with the Science Eye implant.
Zooey Liao/CNET
RGCs are also separated into distinct types, which relay slightly different information to the brain. “I’ve heard people refer to them as, like, Photoshop filters,” Hodak explains. “When you stack them all together, you get the natural scene.”
In theory, a future version of the FlexLED device could drive different types of RGCs. Hodak notes that he isn’t sure if this is possible just yet, but with refinement, the device may even be able to have a constant, one-to-one mapping between a pixel on its FlexLED screen and an individual RGC. Combined with the brain’s ability to adapt over time, high-resolution vision restoration could be within reach.
SCIENCE ISN’T THE only team working on modifying the eye to restore vision, but in the burgeoning field of optogenetics, its approach is unique.
A number of companies are experimenting with different techniques, including using gene-editing RGCs and light-altering goggles. For instance, French biotech company GenSight is working on a similar optogenetics system, using gene therapy and glasses. Its system doesn’t require overlaying a thin microLED on the retina like the Science Eye, making it less risky. Instead, it uses goggles to amplify the ambient, natural light into a monochromatic signal that genetically edited RGCs can decipher.
This method arguably provides less fine control of opsin activation in the RGCs, but it’s already in clinical trials and has been shown to “partially restore” vision in a patient with retinitis pigmentosa, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Nature. The patient was able to detect objects, like a notepad on a table, after wearing the GenSight glasses over a matter of months.
Hodak’s previous place of employment, Neuralink, also recently entered the race to restore vision. Hodak co-founded that brain-computer startup with a team of scientists, engineers and, yes, Elon Musk back in 2016. Hodak left in 2021. The comparison between the two companies has been the primary focus of articles regarding Science to date, with publications dubbing the biotech firm a “Neuralink rival.”
Comparing the two is, at this stage, kind of like comparing In-N-Out Burger to Whole Foods. Neuralink’s approach involves implanting electrodes directly into the brain, where they’re tasked with interpreting signals and stimulating brain cells in an effort to restore movement and sight, and, according to Musk, allow humans to merge with AI.
Regulatory bodies are already showing concerns about that approach. Neuralink has failed one application to the US Food and Drug Administration to get its product into trials. Science will face the same hurdles, but the Science Eye has one major advantage over the Link: Surgery of the eye comes with its own dangers, but they’re not comparable to inserting electrodes into the brain.
Safety remains paramount, however. Raymond Wong, a stem cell biologist at the University of Melbourne working on eye disease treatments, notes Science will need to make sure “the implant doesn’t cause damage to neighboring retina cells, increase intraocular pressure [or] cause intraocular inflammation.” These are potential problems Hodak, Mardinly and others are trying to solve in preclinical work using rabbits like Leela, and likely primates too, but the real test will come when the devices first make their way into humans.
That moment will, Hodak hopes, be just the beginning. Though the Science Eye is the only device that’s been publicly unveiled, it’s clear Science is already thinking beyond. It would be shortsighted to assume otherwise. After all, the startup’s ambitions are lurking right there in the name. Science. This isn’t a company built around one product or goal.
“It’s early days but if this works it’ll be an enormous company,” says Hodak. “Like, we’re not in any one area of medical devices, we might not even be just medical devices eventually.” Hodak is coy when pressed about those devices, saying they’ll be announced if and when they’re ready. There have been some indications, though, of Science’s ultimate ambitions.
WHEN HODAK ANNOUNCED his new venture on his personal blog in late 2021, he made a bold proclamation. “The future isn’t better smartphones or AR glasses: It’s making the sensorium itself directly programmable, and maybe even adding new senses entirely,” he wrote.
This idea — reprogramming the brain to experience new senses — isn’t limited to the realm of science fiction. The brain is intrinsically linked to how we experience the world. We’ve evolved five senses, at least according to Aristotle, and that view holds true today: touch, smell, sight, taste and hearing. Modern science has added a couple more. Our balance is a special sense, as is proprioception, the ability to discern our body’s location and movement.
There are even scientists who believe the number of senses we have stretches into the 20s; our ability to discern the passage of time and our body’s reaction to hot and cold states are other senses. What Hodak seems to be getting at when he talks about programming the sensorium is the notion that the brain isn’t an unchanging organ. It’s receptive to new, external inputs and, over time, it can learn to adapt to them. Give it a new way to interact with the world, and slowly it will process that information in a way the body can understand.
Now, instead of restoring vision, perhaps imagine a Science Eye implanted in a person with perfect vision. It might stimulate the brain in such a way that the person sees specific images or places, via fine control of the RGCs. You could see and interact with an entire world that isn’t there. It’s kind of like plugging in to a simulation, a virtual world plugged directly in to your eye. It’s an idea exemplified by the posters that line the hallways of Science, artwork jokingly referred to as “propaganda” by Hodak. One, in particular, catches my eye. It’s an abstract piece featuring a series of colored nodes in the shape of a brain. Underneath it reads: “Alter the brain, alter reality.”
Announcing Science Corp, Hodak signed off with, “See you in the Matrix.”
Getty Images
If that reminds you of a classic science fiction film of the 2000s, that’s deliberate. Hodak signed off from his announcement blog post with the words: “See you in the Matrix.”
In that short sentence, perhaps, we get a glimpse of what Science intends to accomplish.
We’re a long way from that future. And, to be clear, I didn’t find any locked doors during my tour of the Science facility in Alameda. There was no suggestion that secretive plans were taking shape behind the scenes — to supercharge our senses or create artificial worlds where you can upload karate skills directly into your brain. But, as the company exited stealth, that blog post from Hodak was at the front of my mind. So were the rabbits.
Before I leave, animal technician Jess Tapp takes me into Science’s animal house where rabbits hide out in their hutches. She knows them by name and speaks to them like they’re her personal companions. One of the rabbits — I didn’t write down the name — is rather shy. As I bend down and look inside, I can see her nose twitching a little, her ears at attention.
She bounds, carefully and inquisitively, to the front of the hutch. As she does so, the light catches in her eyes, reflecting the deep red typical of her breed. The storyteller in me hopes to see something in them, but the rabbit just turns and heads to safety at the back of her hutch.
Disclosure: Kevin Smith, Science Corp’s cell engineer, is a childhood friend of Jackson Ryan.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
