Not good ones, in my opinion, but I can give you a couple of names to look for and you can judge the articles and videos for yourself. William Dobelle was the researcher and Jens Naumann is "patient alpha", the first person with the potentially practical system implanted. An earlier test patient had an implant in the 1970s that was primarily intended to test the viability of neural implants and only gave slow motion extremely low res vision and only when connected to a room-sized mainframe, but Jen Naumann had the version you can walk with. Or drive with - Dobelle lent Naumann his car for a slow drive around a car park. If Dobelle hadn't died in 2004, improvements would almost certainly have continued. Portable computer hardware was one of the things holding Dobelle back and that's improved a great deal in the last 10 years.
This old Wired article is quite good:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision.html
There are other researchers working on it, but Dobelle was unusual. It was his life's work, he funded himself and he pushed things (e.g. when testing the idea of retinal implants before deciding that neural implants were required, he used himself as a test subject).
Life expectancy has almost doubled in modern times, but that has been mainly due to a huge decrease in pre-adult mortality (in the past, only about 2/3rds of people survived to adulthood). Life expectancy is a misnomer. It says nothing about how long a person can reasonably expect to live. It's just an average. e.g. if you have 2 people who die at 70 and 1 person who dies at 1, the "life expectancy" of that group of 3 people is 47.Regarding longevity, I've watched some talks given by Dr Aubrey De Grey and I find it fascinatingfrom what I remember he believes it's almost a certainty that our life expectancy will grow rapidly in the future - in fact it's already growing quickly.
Is there actually rapid growth in the age at which old age kills people, or is that fewer people are dying at relatively young ages?
The most rapid increase in "life expectancy" is already over (at least in this country) because pre-adult mortality has been vastly decreased. Slower increases in the last few decades might be explained by fewer people dying in their 40s and 50s from increasingly curable problems and earlier diagnoses. Is there evidence that people are aging more slowly than in the past?
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