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What It Looks Like When You Fry Your Eye In An Eclipse (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Doctors in New York say a woman in her 20s came in three days after looking at the Aug. 21 eclipse without protective glasses. She had peeked several times, for about six seconds, when the sun was only partially covered by the moon. Four hours later, she started experiencing blurred and distorted vision and saw a central black spot in her left eye. The doctors studied her eyes with several different imaging technologies, described in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology, and were able to observe the damage at the cellular level.
"We were very surprised at how precisely concordant the imaged damage was with the crescent shape of the eclipse itself," noted Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, in an email to NPR. He says this was the most severely injured patient they saw after the eclipse. All in all, 22 people came to their urgent care clinic with concerns about possible eclipse-related damage, and most of them complained of blurred vision. Of those, only three showed some degree of abnormality in the retina. Two of them had only mild changes, however, and their symptoms have gone away. The young woman described in this case report, at last check, still has not recovered normal vision. For your viewing pleasure, The Verge has embedded several images of the woman's retinas in their report.
"We were very surprised at how precisely concordant the imaged damage was with the crescent shape of the eclipse itself," noted Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, in an email to NPR. He says this was the most severely injured patient they saw after the eclipse. All in all, 22 people came to their urgent care clinic with concerns about possible eclipse-related damage, and most of them complained of blurred vision. Of those, only three showed some degree of abnormality in the retina. Two of them had only mild changes, however, and their symptoms have gone away. The young woman described in this case report, at last check, still has not recovered normal vision. For your viewing pleasure, The Verge has embedded several images of the woman's retinas in their report.
There is geek/nerd psychological interest in this. Take it from the viewpoint of under standers looking at the world of believers, the look before you leap crowd vs the hesitate and lose. That itself is an interesting study in social genetics, how a society produces both, to solve social problems ie a problem presents itself and there is a believe structure to solve that 'style' of problem, the believers jump in without hesitation and try their luck with their belief, succeed and quick solution, fail and well, they are dead and the under standers who seek to understand the problem and understand the range of solutions to the range of problems within that style of problem, then work out a solution. That catch for under standers, they could perish, whilst they are attempt to properly understand and solve the problem, that could have been solved believers using a belief that happened to work.
From an under standers point of view, believers look really immature, those kids who you could never tell to not run with scissors as adults still running with scissors, well, at least until the trip and stab themselves once and how now created a belief on why it is bad to run with scissors. Those individuals will never look at the sun again without protective eye wear.
Social genetics at work, we evolve as a species and as a society not upon an individual basis. It's like saying psychopaths are really competitive but too many and they collapse the entire society and everyone dies out, including the psychopaths genes. The story is not news, it is an interesting idea to explore and understand. The empty main stream media news style is for believers, people who can and will believe anything, independent news and more importantly news analysis is for under standers because we need to understand how those morons work, else we are the ones those dumb fuckers burn at the stake or cut off our heads based upon idiotic beliefs, as in the past, so watch out for the future (how many of you want the apostate arseholes of the house of Saud ruling over you, would you be able to resist calling them a pack of egoistic shit heads and demand they be thrown out of power and punished for their crimes).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Save your flat-Earth conspiracy for another site, comrade. Everyone knows the world ended on December 21, 2012. The flat Earth we think we see if just a hologram to cover up the fact that the real flat Earth was destroyed by a stampede of cosmic elephants incited by one of them turtles a couple dozen levels down.
The NPR article is incorrect. She only looked at the sun without glasses for a few seconds. She found that uncomfortable. A woman nearby had eclipse viewing glasses but wasn't viewing the eclipse because she said she was blind as a bat anyway. So she asked to borrow the glasses.
She then viewed the sun for 15-20 seconds through those glasses, which they suspect is when the damage occurred. The glasses were probably fakes which didn't block all the rays of the sun. So this isn't a story about an idiot staring at the sun without glasses and destroying her vision as the NPR article implies. It's a story about some evil person destroying someone else's vision for life just so they could make a quick buck.
(Though I suppose it's possible she really is an idiot and made the whole thing up to hide her embarrassment.)