toothbrushing
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Oral-B's latest smart toothbrush has one fatal flaw
Oral-B, those purveyors of tools to keep your teeth clean, have been making Bluetooth electric toothbrushes for a few years now. But its latest, the Oral-B Genius 8000, is the Cadillac of connected Bluetooth toothbrushes, if you're in to that sort of thing. What's interesting about the Genius is that it uses your smartphone's front-facing camera to analyze your brushing patterns and ensure that you're hitting every zone of your mouth sufficiently before you move on. The company has seen that when people brush, they often accidentally skip over or under-brush parts of their mouth, and this is meant to fix that.
'Painless' dental cavity procedure regrows tooth enamel
When a dentist says the word "cavity" a lot of people sweat thinking about painful injections and relentless drilling. But scientists in Britain have developed a new procedure dubbed EAER, or "Electrically Assisted Enhanced Remineralisation," that can repair a slightly decayed tooth before a deep cavity forms. The supposedly painless procedure involves cleaning (not drilling) the tooth of any signs of mild decay, then flushing it with minerals and stimulating it with an electric pulse. This pushes the minerals into the deepest part of the lesion and speeds up a naturally occurring process called "remineralization". This is where minerals in your saliva and some foods enter the tooth enamel and make it stronger.
40 Second Toothbrush complicates, horrifies
We're not going to claim that the toothbrush can't be improved upon -- we know from experience that's not the case. But there is such a thing as going too far. The 40 Second Toothbrush, however, doesn't really claim to be more awesome than your standard stick-and-bristles affair -- just to be much, much faster. How does it cut the timesink of brushing the pearlies down by 66 percent? By having four intense-looking heads, which are capable of hitting up to six surfaces at once, at a rate of 810 swipes per minute. We haven't taken the thing for a spin ourselves, so we're not going to bother naysaying it, but we will say that it looks like a terrifying way to begin or end a day. The mouth violating 40 Second Toothbrush runs $99.95 from Hammacher Schlemmer and is available right now.[Via Red Ferret]
