Next time you go to the dentist for some dreadfully painful procedure, you may have the option of eschewing that Novocaine-bearing needle for a flexible dental mouthpiece that turns out the lights on your maxillofacial nerves. Developed by Laguna Hills-based BioMedDevice Limited, and recently approved by the FDA, the so-called gumEase uses no conventional anesthetics, instead relying on cryoanesthesia: basically, the freezer-stored device chills your mouth into numbness. One application of gumEase, which lasts up to 20 minutes, is said to relieve 90% of a patient's pain within two to three minutes -- and to prove it, the manufacturer has produced a rather graphic video depicting a hypodermic-free tooth extraction, which you can watch at your own risk after the break. With products such as this one and the RelaxView HMD seemingly making dental visits more pleasant than ever before, we may actually have to review our policy of only making appointments during leap years.

We've already seen medical students operate on robots that bleed, yap and flat-line, but it's about time dental students underwent the same kind of scrutiny, don'tcha think? If things go as planned, future dentists in Japan could soon be practicing on Simroid, a humanoid that resembles a young woman and can talk back when students hit a nerve. Reportedly, the bot can exclaim "it hurts" and move her eyes / hands whenever discomfort is felt, but best of all, engineers included a "breast sensor" to determine if that area has been touched inappropriately during training. Nothing wrong with ensuring the ethical treatment of robots, we suppose.

[Via Physorg]

We'd gladly trade in most of our gadgets if it meant we never had to go under the drill at the dentist again. But researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada don't want our electronics, they just want a few more years to perfect their low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) technology that they hope will ultimately be able to re-grow lost or severely damaged teeth from the root, eliminating the need for pricey prosthetics and painful procedures. The pea-sized device, which can be held in place by a bracket or a crown, is controlled by a wireless remote and needs to gently massage the gums for 20 minutes a day over the course of four weeks to attain noticeable growth. This tech isn't expected to be available to the public for another two years, so hold off on that all-candy and Red Bull diet you've been planning for just a little longer while you ponder the rather incredible possibility that this method could eventually be used to grow human bones and actually make people taller without subjecting them to any kind of medieval torture.