Human retina has built-in "clockwork" to synchronize visual signals

Visual signals from neighboring retinal cells can travel vastly different distances to reach the brain - and yet we don't see a scrambled, delayed picture. New research from IOB Basel reveals why: the retina itself synchronizes these signals before they leave the eye.

Published in Nature Neuroscience, the study shows that retinal nerve fibers with longer paths develop larger diameters, allowing faster signal transmission. This "axonal tuning" reduces timing differences to mere milliseconds, ensuring all visual information arrives at the brain simultaneously.

The discovery challenges assumptions that the brain alone coordinates visual timing. Instead, the eye acts as its own sophisticated timing mechanism - revealing fundamental principles about how our nervous system achieves temporal precision.

Harvard SEAS and University of Chicago researchers have tested and validated lightweight nanofabricated structures that can passively float in the mesophere, which is about 45 miles above Earth’s surface. The devices levitate via photophoresis, or sunlight-driven propulsion, which occurs in the low-pressure conditions of the upper atmosphere.

In a new study, archaeologists analyzed iron artifacts spanning more than 400 years of American colonial history using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. Their results show that differences in the purity of iron and the trace elements it contains can be reliably used as a diagnostic feature to identify iron artifacts from different time periods.

A transdisciplinary team of University of Pittsburgh and Kenyan researchers has developed a discrete event simulation (DES), a computer-based model, that reveals gaps in the blood transfusion continuum to help optimize the “vein-to-vein” process from collection to storage to delivery and transfusion in Kenya. The research, which provides the first quantitative model of the blood continuum in a low- to middle-income country (LMIC), is published in the article “Simulating the blood transfusion system in Kenya: Modelling methods and exploratory analyses” (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0004587) in PLOS Global Public Health. I