Month: May 2024

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Julian Stratenschulte)

The field of dentistry is lagging on adopting evidence-based care and, as such, is rife with overdiagnoses and overtreatments that may align more with the economic pressures of keeping a dental practice afloat than what care patients actually need. At least, that's according to a trio of health and dental researchers from Brazil and the United Kingdom, led by epidemiologist and dentist Paulo Nadanovsky, of the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.

In a viewpoint published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers point out that many common—nearly unquestioned—practices in dentistry aren't backed up by solid data. That includes the typical recommendation that everyone should get a dental check-up every 6 months. The researchers note that two large clinical trials failed to find a benefit of 6-month check-ups compared with longer intervals that were up to 2 years.

A 2020 Cochrane review that assessed the two clinical trials concluded that "whether adults see their dentist for a check‐up every six months or at personalized intervals based on their dentist's assessment of their risk of dental disease does not affect tooth decay, gum disease, or quality of life. Longer intervals (up to 24 months) between check‐ups may not negatively affect these outcomes." The Cochrane reviewers reported that they were "confident" of little to no difference between 6-month and risk-based check-ups and were "moderately confident" that going up to 24-month checkups would make little to no difference either.

Enlarge / An American Airlines Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner preparing to take off at Barcelona-El Prat Airport in Spain on May 1, 2024. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating whether Boeing failed to complete required inspections on 787 Dreamliner planes and whether Boeing employees falsified aircraft records, the agency said this week. The investigation was launched after an employee reported the problem to Boeing management, and Boeing informed the FAA.

"The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing after the company voluntarily informed us in April that it may not have completed required inspections to confirm adequate bonding and grounding where the wings join the fuselage on certain 787 Dreamliner airplanes," the FAA said in a statement provided to Ars today.

The FAA said it "is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records. At the same time, Boeing is reinspecting all 787 airplanes still within the production system and must also create a plan to address the in-service fleet." The agency added that it "will take any necessary action—as always—to ensure the safety of the flying public."

Enlarge / Line up those colors and close those gaps... for science!

In 2020, a new minigame appeared in the video game Borderlands 3, located in the resident scientist’s laboratory on the spaceship Sanctuary III.  Although the arcade game may seem like just another way to pass in-game time, the tile-matching puzzle game—Borderlands Science—has allowed millions of players to help map the human gut microbiome.

Borderlands Science is one of the first examples of a citizen science game being embedded in a mainstream video game; it translates players’ tile matching into sequence alignment of microbial DNA strands that encode ribosomal RNA. Ultimately, this can help deduce the genetic relationships between different gut microbes—crucial information for demystifying the complex web of interactions among diet, disease, and microbiome.

Since launch, over 4 million gamers have played Borderlands Science, collectively solving over 100 million puzzles, making this one of the largest citizen science projects ever. Not only has the game generated huge player engagement, but the results have outperformed state-of-the-art computational methods, according to an analysis of the project published in Nature Biotechnology.