Harvard has reported a breakthrough flat artificial eye just 30 microns in depth which can exceed the capabilities of the human eye. The technology, which builds on so-called metalens technology by adding electrically-controlled flexible muscles, could make a real impact in all manner of optical fields, including those in cameras, telescopes, microscopes, glasses and even virtual reality.
  The prototype device can make simultaneous adjustments for image focus, image shift and astigmatism, all of which can cause blurred images, and which are adjustments beyond what our own eyes can do. The technology can also focus in real time, just as our eyes can.
  "All optical systems with multiple components … have slight misalignments or mechanical stresses on their components … that will always cause small amounts of astigmatism and other aberrations, which could be corrected by an adaptive optical element," explains Alan She, an author of the research. "Because the adaptive metalens is flat, you can correct those aberrations and integrate different optical capabilities onto a single plane of control."
  The metalens She refers to is a flat silicon nanostructure which focuses light. But this eye goes further by adding the surrounding artificial muscle, which posed some real challenges to the team.
  The first of these was to make the metalens much bigger, as earlier  prototypes were no larger than a piece of glitter. Scale that up to a 1-cm (0.4-in) lens, and the team discovered that the data needed to describe the design of the lens could amount to terabytes, thanks to the complexity of the nanostructures involved.
  To overcome the problem, the team developed an algorithm capable of describing lens production which reduced the data down to a manageable size, and made it compatible with technology used to make integrated circuits. If the lenses could be made in more or less the same way as circuits, as the research suggests, this is a considerable boon for the commercial viability of the technology.
  The next challenge was in attaching an artificial muscle to the lens without significantly compromising its optical performance. The team chose a dielectric elastomer – an elastic polymer which could be controlled by applying electricity via carbon nanotube electrodes. The researchers identified an elastomer which allowed light to pass through without much loss due to scattering.
  Unlike other artificial eye technology we've seen, there seems to be no suggestion of this technology having potential in human implants, though we've asked for clarification on this.
The team intends to work towards further improvements, including reducing the voltage needed to control the eye and improving its speed of response.
  The research was carried out at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The team's paper has been published in Science Advances.

In a remarkable milestone, researchers have grown human eggs from their earliest stages to maturity in a laboratory for the very first time. The achievement offers a future for women at risk of infertility, either through illness or medical treatment, to be able to store immature eggs for later fertilization.
Building on 30 years of research, this achievement outlines three fundamental steps that successfully took ovarian tissue samples and nurtured them into human eggs to a point of full maturity. It is not clear how healthy the final eggs produced are as the speed of maturation in the lab was significantly faster than it would occur in the human body.

"Being able to fully develop human eggs in the lab could widen the scope of available fertility treatments," explains Evelyn Telfer, lead on the research. "We are now working on optimizing the conditions that support egg development in this way and studying how healthy they are. We also hope to find out, subject to regulatory approval, whether they can be fertilized."
Much more work needs to be done before this breakthrough leads to any clinical applications, and while many researchers recognize the milestone achievement, they also suggest there are many important questions yet to be answered.
"The technology remains at an early stage, and much more work is needed to make sure that the technique is safe and optimized before we ascertain whether these eggs remain normal during the process, and can be fertilized to form embryos that could lead to healthy babies," says Ali Abbara, an endocrinologist from Imperial College London who didn't work on this new study.
Additionally, the researchers say insights into the development of human eggs at various stages provided by the study could help research into other infertility treatments.
The new research was published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction.