Is crossing your eyes really bad for you? Short answer: You're fine, don't worry. No, your eyes won't get stuck if you cross them for a joke every once in a while. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When your mom told you to stop crossing your eyes as a kid or they'd stay stuck that way, was she right?

If your monitor hurts your eyes, a problem sometimes referred to as computer vision syndrome, there isn't just one thing that could be the culprit. Instead, there are a host of problems that could be affecting your eyes. A few simple steps can provide clues as to whether or not your monitor is damaging your eyes. They can also suggest some other possible causes, basic fixes, and what to look for in your next monitor. This is not medical advice and you should absolutely talk to your eye doctor about any and all issues. With the rise of computer-based work, those experiencing eye pain are more likely to blame their monitor today than ever.

With an increasing interest in human-robot collaboration, there is a need to develop robot behavior while keeping the human user's preferences in mind. Highly skilled human users doing delicate tasks require their robot partners to behave according to their work habits and task constraints. To achieve this, we present the use of the Optometrist's Algorithm (OA) to interactively and intuitively personalize robot-human handovers. Using this algorithm, we tune controller parameters for speed, location, and effort. We study the differences in the fluency of the handovers before and after tuning and the subjective perception of this process in a study of $N=30$ non-expert users of mixed background -- evaluating the OA. The users evaluate the interaction on trust, safety, and workload scales, amongst other measures. They assess our tuning process to be engaging and easy to use. Personalization leads to an increase in the fluency of the interaction. Our participants utilize the wide range of parameters ending up with their unique personalized handover.

AOP clinical and professional director, Dr Peter Hampson, and head of clinical negligence, Efa Schmidt, discussed safe practice and developments in artificial intelligence technology in their presentation The good, the bad and the ugly at 100% Optical (London ExCel, 23-25 April). Schmidt shared with the audience that her role involves overseeing clinical negligence claims at the AOP. "One of the issues that we find causes great concern amongst optometrists is the fear of litigation," she said. Schmidt added that sometimes optometrists can be fearful that their practice will be judged by a higher standard than is applied. She noted that optometrists are expected to act in a way that is reasonable, taking the same steps that the majority of other optometrists would take.

I want smart glasses to be a thing. So far, every real pair of smart glasses has fallen woefully short of the mark. Amazon's Echo Frames are the latest smart glasses to follow in that storied tradition of overpromising and underdelivering. They are essentially an Echo Dot that you wear on your face--built entirely around interacting with Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa. They don't have a screen in the lenses like the Focals by North or most other smart eyewear.

In Marvel's comic universe following the end of World War II Howard Stark tries to tap into the energy of the mystical "Tesseract" and develops the arc reactor -- a technology he believes to hold the key to unlimited, sustainable energy and would make nuclear energy look like an AAA battery. However, the perfect reactor cannot be built without a certain theoretical element and he lacks the technology to synthesize it. In the film "Iron Man", his son Tony Stark builds a miniature version of the Arc Reactor when held hostage in an Afghan cave to power an electromagnet, which keeps deadly shrapnel from piercing his heart. Even this small reactor has a remarkable output of 3 GJ/s -- as much as three times the average energy produced by a nuclear power plant. As the reactor's waste products threaten to poison him, Tony searches for new elements for the reaction.