Ancient Beavers Take Silver in Log-Chomping Olympics

sea-maid submitted, created time 4 months 3 weeks (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Call it The Great Gnaw-Off. By studying logs chomped nearly five million years ago, researchers have discovered that ancient beavers weren't nearly as expert lumberjacks as their modern cousins. Indeed, the evidence suggests that they would have been trounced by today's beavers in a tree-cutting Olympics. Researchers say the finding provides rare insight into how one of the animal kingdom's busiest critters may have shaped ancient landscapes

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Gum Disease Signals Diabetes Risk

sea-maid submitted, created time 4 months 4 weeks (well.blogs.nytimes.com)

It’s long been known that oral health is an important indicator for the body’s overall health. Now new research suggests gum disease may predict whether you develop diabetes.

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Can you turn teeth into sperm?

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 3 weeks (www.newscientist.com)

COULD sacrificing a tooth enable some infertile men to father children? That's the goal of researchers in Brazil, who suggest that stem cells from human teeth can be coaxed into becoming sperm by being injected into the testes of mice.

Irina Kerkis of the Butantan Institute in São Paulo and her colleagues injected stem cells from the dental pulp of human teeth into the testes of live mice. The cells seemed to migrate to the tubules where sperm usually mature and differentiate into cells resembling human sperm

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Self-Efficacy Perspective on Oral Health among Turkish Pre-adolescents.

basakacademy submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (ohpd.quintessenz.de)

The article presents newly designed tooth-brushing self-efficacy scale for adolescents, first of its kind, and also a modified dietary self-efficacy scale.The present study concludes that self-efficacy beliefs were associated with oral health, and related behaviour among pre-adolescents. These beliefs were also related to health promoting behaviors (e.g. less hours of watching TV, increased daily dairy consumption,less sugar consumption) and school performance of the pre-adolescents

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Early humans ate roots, not grass

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.nature.com)

Woe to proponents of rabbit food! Studies of human and mole rat teeth suggest that early humans dined on carbohydrate-heavy starchy roots and not the fibrous leaves above.

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Do you konw that Calcium during breast-feeding may guard mom

catherine submitted, created time 1 year 11 months (www.sciam.com)

Women who breast-feed may need to be careful about getting enough calcium to keep their teeth and gums healthy, new animal research suggests.

In experiments with rats, researchers found that lactating rodents were particularly susceptible to the effects of low calcium intake on the bones that support the teeth. Such bone-density loss can speed the progression of any existing gum disease.

Though the findings come from animals, researchers do suggest it's important for breast-feeding mothers to include enough calcium in their diets.

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