TL;DR
For people who have lost central vision to the advanced dry form of macular degeneration, there has been no way to get it back. Now there is a chip for that, on sale in Europe. A sliver of solar cell slipped under the retina, driven by light from special glasses, let trial patients read about five more lines of an eye chart on average. The vision it gives is black-and-white and low-resolution, and it is not yet approved in the U.S. In a separate study, a soldier who lost a hand felt touch again through a prosthetic wired to his nerves. Taken together, devices that put lost senses back are leaving the lab, one disease and one patient at a time.
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