Word: mcmahons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...games, with 10-1 BYU--which might have retained a shot at the national title had it not succumbed to New Mexico in the season opener--pitted against 8-3 Southern Methodist University. Brigham Young led the nation in offense, directed by the country's passing leader, quarterback Jim McMahon. McMahon's numbers make stat freaks drool--284 for 445, 4571 yds. SMU has improved gradually over the course of the autumn. BYU in a wild...
Their latest toy is an artificial eye. Though McMahon and Greene are just starting to apply biomechanics to myopia, its potentials alone signify a major advance. The field has long been what Greene calls a "thicket of controversy." No study has conclusively settled the origins of myopia, nor how much heredity or eye-strain is to blame. "Myopia has been associated with everthing from pregnancy to tooth decay," Greene says. Researchers agree only that myopia is the abnormal bulging of the back of the eye or "posterior sclera," usually around the gap for the optic nerve...
Recent experiments with animals led McMahon and Greene to apply their methods to eyes. Dr. Torsten N. Wiesel, professor of Neurobiology, and Dr. Elio Raviola, professor of Anatomy at the Medical School, did experiments in which they forced monkeys to read, and found that they quickly developed myopia. Dr. J. Wallman at New York University discovered that chickens, when forced with blinders to look straight ahead instead of sideways as they normally do, also become near-sighted. These results indicate that myopia can be induced. Further, because the animals' eyes degenerated at similar rates, which can be computed mathematically, McMahon...
...McMahon and Greene set to work building a mechanical eye. The model immediately provided two insights. First, strain occurs when the two oblique muscles--the muscles in the back of the eye which control its rotation--are tensed greatly, as in reading. The tension stretches and strains the sclera. Though such stretching is normally elastic, if it is both frequent and extreme enough the sclera does not return to its normal position and myopia develops. Second, the eye is least able to reduce strain near the point where the optic nerve enters the eye--Greene draws an analogy with...
...McMahon and Greene have come up with several possible solutions, but have tested none so far. One is the surgical relocation of the oblique muslcles, which Greene claims is a relatively simple operation. Another is to flare surgically the point of attachment of these muscles, dispersing the strain. McMahon and Greene also talk about prescribing prismatic eyeglasses, lenses which dupe the eyes into "thinking" they are focused on a distant point. These solutions remain speculative, but for the 30 to 40 per cent of all Americans who suffer from myopia, hope is in sight...