My data indicates that I've got about average risk for developing macular degeneration, a kind of blindness.

In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa, or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed.

And she told me the nurses hadn't mentioned this that she was blind, that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years.

and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, diseases like macular degeneration, and there's little that can be done for them.

But Folkman persevered, and eventually he proved that such chemical substances do exist. Today, four decades later, such substances have been used to treat more than 10 million people with neovascular diseases such as macular degeneration and many different forms of cancer.

So what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration? What happens is is that, the front end cells die, the photoreceptors die, and over time, all the cells and the circuits that are connected to them, they die too.

Until the only things that you have left are these cells here, the output cells, the ones that send the signals to the brain, but because of all that degeneration they aren't sending any signals anymore.

The most lethal strain of leadership degeneration is escalating predation among the ruling elites. The most visible symptom is corruption, but the cause is intrinsic to autocratic rule. Typically, first generation revolutionaries have a strong emotional and ideological attachment to certain ideals, however misguided they may be.

Among many of the systemic flaws of autocracy, degeneration at the top, epitomized by ever weaker leaders, is progressive and incurable. The exclusive and closed nature of autocracy bars many talented individuals from rising to senior government positions, owing to a pattern of succession that rewards political loyalty over capabilities.

The degeneration of the OHR's influence coincided with the withdrawal of the US military and the hollowing out of Eufor, which now has little in the way of operational capacity. Despite the danger signals, France and Spain apparently want to pull the plug on Eufor altogether before the end of the year, seemingly to prove the purely technical point that EU missions can end.