Joe Hogan, Align Technology's plastics-nerd CEO, says you shouldn't eat with your aligners and that you don't need to wear your retainers every night. Joe Hogan sees a lot of smiles. When people ask him where he works, he responds with "Align Technology," which inevitably prompts the follow up, "What's that?" After months, sometimes years, the discrete rival to braces promises to give people smiles they will want to show off. Hogan gets a look at them all. And he's eager to see more. Align is embarking on its biggest manufacturing overhaul since it was founded by two Stanford Graduate School of Business classmates 29 years ago. The company is preparing to begin directly 3D printing the aligners at the core of its business, ditching what Hogan describes as a longer, more wasteful process that involves making molds. A successful transition could lower costs and make treatment more affordable in the long run, bringing Invisalign to more customers and boosting Align's profits. It also, according to Hogan, would entrench Align as the world's biggest user of 3D printers .

Why do we even have baby teeth? Those temporary chompers actually play an important role. Baby teeth help kids eat and speak. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The emergence of baby teeth might be among new parents' worst and best times.

In this paper, we address this gap by dividing a typical patient's clinical journey

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 .

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 .

'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.

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? 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.

--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.