Discovered: swimming robots, dandelion light material, antibiotics aren't a cure-all, the better ways to wake up, and three's a trend for declining birth rates.

  • Computerized contact lenses were successfully tested out on rabbits. The inevitable invention, contact lenses that allow us to filter the real world through a digitized reality, have been, to some degree, successfully tested out ("a single pixel" has been projected on lenses). And, as Scientific American points out, a University of Washington professor, Babak Parviz, tinkering with the design first tested out the safety of it by "placing the lenses on the eyes of lab rabbits." Those tests, as the BBC notes, went well "with no obvious adverse effects." But the ultimate goal of morphing all of humanity into robots is still a ways off: "Our next goal is to incorporate some predetermined text in the contact lens," said Parviz to the BBC. [Scientific American, BBC News via WSJ Tech Europe]

  • Everyone has their own crazy ideas about vitamins. According to who you talk to, multivitamins are a great nutritional supplement, a placebo, somewhere in between, or potential health risk. Also, according to a Taiwanese study, they gave participants the idea that if they popped a pill (which turned out to be a placebo), they'd get a free pass for doing a whole bunch of things that a multivitamin wouldn't be helpful with anyway. Sort of a skewed idea healthy-unhealthy balance, as NBC reported: "Those taking phony supplements reported a greater sense of invulnerability and less of a desire to exercise. They also were more likely to consider engaging in casual sex, sunbathing, and binge-drinking." [NBC Vitals]

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.