Cornell neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg received a MacArthur Genius Award for figuring out, for the first time ever, how our retinas take images from the outside world and turn them into a neural "code" that the brain can understand. It started as a pure research project, but now she’s building the code into a device that could bring sight to the blind. Video by Alan Jeffries.
Bloomberg's "The Spark" is a series that looks at innovators finding solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems.