A brush stops half of toddler cavities; a clue to resilient brains

Dentists painted 38% silver diamine fluoride onto cavities. At six months, decay had stopped in 54.0% of treated lesions, against 22.5% with a placebo 247. Application takes a sponge-tipped applicator and a few seconds per tooth, with no drilling, shots, or sedation 226. Treatment-related adverse events were close between the groups: 47.3% with the liquid, 43.3% with placebo 247.

Her team looked at a rare group of immature neurons. These cells are still present in people over 80, but they behave differently in those who develop dementia than in those who stay cognitively healthy 11. Salta's guess at the job they do: "Perhaps they can add new brain cells to a network that is degenerating" 11.

Adherence stood out. Only 3.6% of those assigned to inulin alone dropped out, against 21% of those assigned to a digital physical therapy program alone 1. The results appeared in Nutrients. Lead author Afroditi Kouraki said adding a fiber supplement to breakfast or yogurt "could meaningfully reduce pain and improve physical function" 1.

The doctor behind it, Kevin Strauss, is building a biotech company by and for the people he treats, inside a medical center framed in wood with mortise-and-tenon joints 103. Its goal is gene therapies for the rare diseases that afflict Amish and Mennonite people. Part of the plan is to revive treatments that pharma abandoned or that sat in an academic freezer, often because too few patients exist to generate profit 103. STAT's companion piece tells of a nonprofit reviving a shelved gene therapy after the startup that owned it shut down 101.

The team picked it because it looked stretched in older Hubble images, and Webb's spectrograph then showed the ring, in the words of first author Michele Perna, with "much more detailed data" 22. A small companion galaxy is moving away at about 425 kilometers per second (264 miles per second), and a bridge of gas links the two 22. That fits the standard picture of a ring: a small galaxy plunges through the center of a larger one, a wave of dense gas ripples outward like a stone dropped in a pond, and stars form where the gas piles up 22.

The seamount covers only about 2 square kilometers 69. Commercial fisheries had reported odd eel numbers there since the 1980s and 1990s, and a deep-sea camera towed in 2007 finally filmed the crowd 69. The eels live there year-round but peak from March to May, and eels caught at the peak were in advanced spawning condition, both males and females 69.

The gap between speech age and real age was also linked to brain-scan and DNA-based measures of aging, a blood marker of Alzheimer's disease, and lifetime social hardship 113. The tool listens for a slower speaking rate, longer pauses, changes in pitch and emotional tone, and a vocabulary that shifts toward concrete objects and away from abstract ideas 113. Hernan Hernandez of the Latin American Brain Health Institute led the work 113.