In the US, there is a research program called the ‘Artificial Retina Project’ It is developing a “bionic eye” for people with disease of the retina. The goal is to allow patients with little or no light perception to gain unaided mobility.

It consists of a miniature camera and computer chip mounted on a pair of spectacles, and a small implant behind the ear linked to an array of electrodes attached to the cells of the retina. As an image is picked up by the camera, the information is converted into electronic signals that are passed via the implant to the electrodes on the retina, from where they travel via the optic nerve to the brain. Whats very important is that the device processes information in real time.

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Once the proud center of the Uranium Universe, and until recently the world’s largest uranium producer, the city of Grants (New Mexico) nearly collapsed in the 1980s as uranium prices sank into a twenty-year depression. Five thousand uranium miners lost their jobs, and the city elders panicked, searching for an industry with which to replace mining. “Uranium companies helped build our hospital, our school and most of our major infrastructure,” Star Gonzales, Cibola County’s Head of Economic Development, told StockInterview.com. “We are a mining community and know it is beneficial.”

Grants is a sleepy town of less than 10,000, north of Interstate 40, off exit 85, and about an hour’s west of Albuquerque. This past November, we toured the town’s Mining Museum, which boasts of having the only underground uranium mining museum. Grants is now a “prison town,” and instead of mining uranium, the town runs most of the state’s prison system. The times are changing again, though. Along with the recent $45.50/pound spot uranium price, revival of uranium mining in Grants is all but a done deal. Several uranium companies have taken their first steps into Cibola County. As with the state of Wyoming, more will follow them.

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