Free Republic

LOS ANGELES — As a promising Caltech graduate student in applied physics, Stephen Kurtin could have taken a job offer from Intel at the dawn of the microelectronics era 40 years ago. Instead he followed the path of a lone inventor, gaining more than 30 patents in fields including word processing software and sound systems, culminating in the pair of glasses resting on his nose, which he believes can free nearly two billion people around the world from bifocals, trifocals and progressive lenses. The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame that makes it possible...

London, Nov 15 (ANI): Religious people really do see the world differently, that's what a new research ahs suggested. The study found that Dutch Calvinists notice embedded visual patterns quicker than their atheist compatriots. According to Bernhard Hommel, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who led the new study, culture has long been known to distort visual perception. In a bid to see if religious differences skew perception, Hommel's team tested 40 Dutch atheist and Calvinist university students, who, religion aside, had similar cultural backgrounds. In the study, Hommel's team showed participants a large triangle or square made...

BETHESDA, Md., June 17 — Almost every Thursday during the academic year, a bus carrying a dozen or so Naval Academy midshipmen leaves Annapolis for the 45-minute drive to Bethesda, where Navy doctors perform laser eye surgery on them, one after another, with assembly-line efficiency. Nearly a third of every 1,000-member Naval Academy class now undergoes the procedure, part of a booming trend among military personnel with poor vision. Unlike in the civilian world, where eye surgery is still largely done for convenience or vanity, the procedure's popularity in the armed forces is transforming career choices and daily life in...