All I want is my two front teeth:

From CBC Radio's "Quirks and Quarks" podcast:

Dr. Joy Richmond, Professor of Pediatric Dentistry at UBC, just mentioned that many of the present dental problems are actually caused by our highly processed food.

In the past (and as recently as the Dark Ages), our food was quite coarse, containing a lot of grit and abrasive material that ground our teeth down. This wear allowed our teeth to fit better in our jaws. That wear is no longer a factor, and our teeth retain their points much longer than is natural, which causes much more force to torque the teeth each time we chew (or grind our teeth), and it is this that causes much of the crookedness and crowding in modern teeth.

This is visible when we look at the statistics of dental problems in ancient skulls - in general, older skulls have fewer dental problems than modern ones (although of course, if you did have problems, they were probably pretty agonizing, since there was little that could be done about it).

HUD? That's so old-fashioned...

There's a group at the University of Washington that is working out how to make contact lenses with video displays inside them. No, really. They have the circuits, the display, the antennae (power and signal) all integrated into the lens itself. Here's a picture of one:

You know how the robots in Terminator scan objects and get data on what is in their field of vision? You could have that too:

Subject: Johnny Fairplay
Note: He owes you $1,500
Last Encounter: Jan 5, 2008 - ran like a cockroach

or

Target: 325 yards
Wind: 15 knots, steady from L
Elevation: -24 feet
Club: Big Bertha

or

Sex: Female
Height: 5'6"
Waist: hard to tell, negligee is in the way
Chances: 1000 to 1 with lens in, 2 to 1 without

The group, led by Babak Parviz, a UW EE prof, has succeeded in integrating the materials and the manufacturing processes for two very different products - a very soft gel for ophthalmic uses and highly flexible substrates for circuits. No human has yet tried them out (that they will admit to), but several rabbits have been subjected to 20 minute sessions of wearing them.

My question is about focus: whenever anything is floating about on my cornea, it is definitely not in focus, so how is the eye going to see anything but a blurry dot? Maybe the LEDs are focused on the retina somehow?

We take another baby step towards our machine future. Skynet will exist, resistance is futile, you will obey.

In any case, the concept is very intriguing, and I can't wait for BlueTooth contacts to appear. Me first! Me first!

La Cucaracha

Factoid for the day: cockroaches seem to have been morphologically stable since the Carboniferous, i.e. over the last 290 to 354 million years.

Modern cockroaches are more similar to their ancient fossil ancestors than any other extant insect - except they are a lot smaller. Some cockroaches from the Permian (about 250 million years ago) were over a foot long. Wouldn't want to step on that at night - it would go like a skateboard!

I haven't seen it in the movies, but most ships in history have had very serious cockroach problems because of the lack of predators. Captain Bligh had the Bounty doused with boiling water to deal with this. We have a cockroach problem at the South Pole's Scott Base in Antarctica for the same reason.

They were among the few creatures to make it through an ancient disaster event called the Permian-Triassic boundary, where 90% to 95% of marine species went extinct, as well as 70% of all land organisms. On an individual level, perhaps as many as 99.5% of separate organisms died as a result of the event. But cockroaches made it.

Other things that made it through and became more important as a result: mosses and worts, therapsids (where we come from), and bivalves.