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Why our ancestors had straight teeth without braces

Popular Science

Small jaws mean big problems for modern humans. Modern diets gave us smaller jaws--and a lifetime of orthodontic problems. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Every year, millions of children and teens undergo a common ritual of growing up: getting braces. And it's not just young folks who turn to metal brackets to handle some common dental issues--the Cleveland Clinic estimates that some 20% of new orthodontic patients are over the age of 18 .


New whitening powder activates with your electric toothbrush

Popular Science

It may even repair damaged enamel and improve your oral microbiome. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Whitening your teeth often comes at a financial and physical cost. Many of today's most popular products including gels, strips, and rinses rely on peroxide-based bleaching solutions. While effective, the chemical processes generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) compounds that not only destroy staining molecules--they can eventually erode tooth enamel .


In ancient Arabia, people dined on sharks and stingrays

Popular Science

'We know that these were not just ordinary proteins, but proteins from the top of the food chain.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A 7,000-year-old grave site in present-day Oman indicates that the region's Neolithic communities sometimes turned to an unexpected trade to not only survive, but thrive in the harsh desert landscape. According to findings published in the journal, the people of southern Arabia actually hunted sharks and even stingrays . Since 2020, researchers from the Archaeological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague (ARÚ) have investigated Wadi Nafūn, an ancient grave site megalith (a structure built with large stones) used by Neolithic locals during the 5th century BCE.


Iron Age teeth reveal the hidden lives of ancient Italians

Popular Science

Their teeth hold tales of childhood nutritional stress. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Archaeologists often focus on what skeletal remains can tell about how and when ancient peoples died. But an individual's final moments are far from their complete life story. By analyzing features like their teeth, researchers can better understand not only the person as an adult, but how they developed over the course of their life.


Were there any venomous dinosaurs?

Popular Science

Were there any venomous dinosaurs? There's been speculation, but no solid proof. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's one of the most memorable scenes in the original movie: the dinosaur spreads the frill around its neck and sprays deadly venom from its jaws. The frill (inspired by Australia's frilled lizard) is pure Hollywood fantasy.


Reading Smiles: Proxy Bias in Foundation Models for Facial Emotion Recognition

Tsangko, Iosif, Triantafyllopoulos, Andreas, Abdelmoula, Adem, Mallol-Ragolta, Adria, Schuller, Bjoern W.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Foundation Models (FMs) are rapidly transforming Affective Computing (AC), with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) now capable of recognising emotions in zero-shot settings. This paper probes a critical but underexplored question: what visual cues do these models rely on to infer affect, and are these cues psychologically grounded or superficially learnt? We benchmark varying scale VLMs on a teeth-annotated subset of AffectNet dataset and find consistent performance shifts depending on the presence of visible teeth. Through structured introspection of -the best-performing model, i.e., GPT -4o, we show that facial attributes like eyebrow position drive much of its affective reasoning, revealing a high degree of internal consistency in its valence-arousal predictions. These patterns highlight the emergent nature of FMs behaviour, but also reveal risks: shortcut learning, bias, and fairness issues--especially in sensitive domains like mental health and education. Understanding and interpreting human emotions is fundamental to social interaction. From early developmental cues in infants, to high-stakes decision-making in adults, facial expressions serve as a primary channel for conveying affect.


MICCAI STS 2024 Challenge: Semi-Supervised Instance-Level Tooth Segmentation in Panoramic X-ray and CBCT Images

Wang, Yaqi, Li, Zhi, Wu, Chengyu, Liu, Jun, Zhang, Yifan, Ni, Jiaxue, Luo, Qian, Chen, Jialuo, Zhang, Hongyuan, Liu, Jin, Han, Can, Fu, Kaiwen, Ji, Changkai, Cai, Xinxu, Hao, Jing, Zheng, Zhihao, Xu, Shi, Chen, Junqiang, Zhang, Qianni, Qian, Dahong, Wang, Shuai, Zhou, Huiyu

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Orthopantomogram (OPGs) and Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) are vital for dentistry, but creating large datasets for automated tooth segmentation is hindered by the labor-intensive process of manual instance-level annotation. This research aimed to benchmark and advance semi-supervised learning (SSL) as a solution for this data scarcity problem. We organized the 2nd Semi-supervised Teeth Segmentation (STS 2024) Challenge at MICCAI 2024. We provided a large-scale dataset comprising over 90,000 2D images and 3D axial slices, which includes 2,380 OPG images and 330 CBCT scans, all featuring detailed instance-level FDI annotations on part of the data. The challenge attracted 114 (OPG) and 106 (CBCT) registered teams. To ensure algorithmic excellence and full transparency, we rigorously evaluated the valid, open-source submissions from the top 10 (OPG) and top 5 (CBCT) teams, respectively. All successful submissions were deep learning-based SSL methods. The winning semi-supervised models demonstrated impressive performance gains over a fully-supervised nnU-Net baseline trained only on the labeled data. For the 2D OPG track, the top method improved the Instance Affinity (IA) score by over 44 percentage points. For the 3D CBCT track, the winning approach boosted the Instance Dice score by 61 percentage points. This challenge confirms the substantial benefit of SSL for complex, instance-level medical image segmentation tasks where labeled data is scarce. The most effective approaches consistently leveraged hybrid semi-supervised frameworks that combined knowledge from foundational models like SAM with multi-stage, coarse-to-fine refinement pipelines. Both the challenge dataset and the participants' submitted code have been made publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/ricoleehduu/STS-Challenge-2024), ensuring transparency and reproducibility.


How scientists analyze ancient DNA from old bones

Popular Science

Centuries-old genetic material can solve historical mysteries, from lost species to what killed Napoleon's army. A glowing, digital double helix represents the billions of base pairs scientists analyze when sequencing ancient DNA. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 1976, workers excavating a tunnel for the Toronto subway system came across some very old bones. Using radiocarbon dating, researchers determined the partial cranium and fragments of antlers were roughly 12,000 years old.


Researchers say human hair could soon be key to repairing teeth damaged by cavities

FOX News

Scientists at King's College London developed a toothpaste ingredient using keratin from human hair that can repair and strengthen damaged tooth enamel.