Tooth Decay High in Children

Tooth decay is the top oral health issues for many children in Qatar. A recent study was conducted by the Al Wakra Hospital’s Prosthodontics consultant, Dr. Mohamed Sultan al-Darwish and found that of 2,113 students 85 percent of them had tooth decay. These students come from 12 different government schools and 4 different private schools and were 50 percent boys and 50 percent girls. Dr. al-Darwish received his PhD in the UK from the University of Gloucestershire based on this research. He used four other dentists and six data-entry dental assistants with him on the project to evaluate the students.

Dr. al-Darwish explained that tooth decay is usually caused by many factors, but has to do with plaque bacteria which diffuses into hard dental tissues that dissolves the mineral content of teeth. He adds, “the three essential factors for dental caries are dental plaque, which can contain harmful bacteria, carbohydrates in the diet and susceptible teeth. The prevalence of dental caries among the school children in Qatar is 85%. The mean value of DMFT is 4.6, 4.8, and 5.5 for 12, 13, and 14-year-old children, respectively. These values are well above the recommended levels of the World Health Organization (WHO), which suggests no more than a DMFT of 3 at the age of 12 years.” He concludes that there needs to be more of an awareness of the oral health needs of schoolchildren in Qatar. Dr. al-Darwish’s study also looked at the associations of the children’s oral health with their knowledge of oral health, their teeth irregularity, and their lifestyle (TV habits, Internet use, passive smoking, and diet).

Dr. al-Darwish’s research will probably be added to the world database of oral heath and diseases to supplement the records of the WHO. The WHO may compare this study in Qatar with similar results that they have found in the Eastern Mediterranean in order to find some sort of solution. Dr. al-Darwish’s study recommends the best way to improve the student’s oral health is to educate parents and school teachers with accurate information in order to raise the general health awareness of those in the area.

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Welcome to the Godzilla Revival

Since the first Japanese film debuted 60 years ago, Godzilla has been a popular film subject. The first movie was mostly to help the Japanese work through the terror that had occurred nine years earlier when two atomic bombs were dropped on their country. Godzilla was a warning story, as well as a way to acknowledge horrors and make them a little less frightening by working through them on screen with a large lizard. Since the first movie was released in 1954 many other Godzilla themed movies followed. The first was an American adaptation of the original Japanese film. This version was released in 1956 and named, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. A few movies had situations where Godzilla met other famous characters like King Kong and Venusian princesses, Megalon, the robot Jet Janguar, and Ultraman. In 1998 Roland Emmerich released a film titled, Godzilla, that tried to find realism and made Godzilla into a T. Rex. Godzilla appeared again in the 2004 film, Godzilla: Final Wars. In this most recent adaptation Godzilla comes from outer-space with 13 other monsters.

The new Godzilla film, directed by Gareth Edwards’s is epic and utilizes excellent CGI effects. It doesn’t focus solely on the monster, but instead tries to imagine how the modern world would react to encountering Godzilla for the first time. Creatively, the movie is very interesting. Edwards starts it with a sequence of images from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species along with footage of historic events like famous presidents and experimental nuclear bombs and some fictional sequences. The characters in the movie that make up most of the action and are largely at the center of the plot are Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) who is a nuclear engineer and his son Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who is a military explosives-disposal expert. The arrival of the monster mends their relationship after Joe Brody was convinced of foul play when the plant where he worked in Japan was destroyed. Ford and Joe discover that the government is using the plant to grow a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (MUTO) that hatches when the two are there and is a giant, prey-mantis figure. The giant bugs destruction allows Edwards to keep the suspense of Godzilla’s arrival at bay for a while. He can also show off the special effects that make this movie so enjoyable. Head to the theatres with popcorn in hand to see how the rest of the movie plays out and pay homage to the old while embracing the new.

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The News of Acquisitions

Tech and start up acquisitions have been occurring at a faster rate this year than they have in the past ten years. The deals cost more and they seem to be happening all over. The most recent big news flash came from the stir around the possibility of Apple acquiring Beats Electronics. This transaction would be huge because it is the largest acquisition for the computer company since 1996 when they bought Steve Jobs’ NeXT for $429 million. The Beats Electronics acquisition makes the NeXT transaction look like peanuts because the price tag is $3.2 billion. The Apple deal goes along with many other, so called “unicorn” acquisitions in the tech industry. Over the past year Facebook bought WhatsApp and Oculus, Google bought Waze and Nest Labs, Microsoft bought Nokia, and Yahoo acquired Tumblr. This rush in acquisitions will surely change the industry and how companies operate and how investors choose to apply their money. These companies that are consuming other now have an ability to quickly grow the companies they have acquired through sales. This fact is why Google has been pushing the advertising business for much of the revenue from their acquired companies. This is simply the fastest way to make money from a recently acquired company. Because so many companies have been so successful recently with acquiring and building revenue from acquisitions, any hesitance of bringing in new product lines has essentially disappeared. Now Apple, Facebook, and Google are eagerly buying up companies that make any sense to own. This is why Apple felt comfortable buying up Beat Electronics to put the headphones in along with their existing product lines. Google buying Nest also made sense for them because of the data the company could provide and the fact that it is central in the home. It is clear these tech companies are flourishing because of their acquisitions, which means that the flood of transactions won’t stop anytime soon.

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Manziel Needs Gordon

The Cleveland Browns almost had a great team this year. They recruited Johnny Menziel in the draft and they hold one of the top five wide receivers in the country, Josh Gordon. Together, they are great. Separately, Manziel will have a hard time getting the team together to stand up to the very physical division of the NFL they are in. The problem is that Manziel was able to throw deep in college, but he depended on his teammates to be there to catch whatever he presented them with. Gordon is still currently on the team, but he may be suspended for a year. This leaves Manziel alone, without someone to lean on like Gordon. The rest of the team is not strong enough to help him the way that Gordon could have so this leaves Manziel with a pretty bleak looking rookie year.

It comes down to the Browns not being smart about Gordon’s possible suspension and taking some risks during the draft. During the 2014 National Football League Draft the Browns traded down to No. 9, hoping that they could get a receiver from Texas A&M named Mike Evans. However, Evans didn’t slip and went to Tampa Bay as many predicted. When that didn’t work out in their favor they went for a corner instead after trading up to 8 and then they stopped looking for a receiver. The draft game is tricky, but it doesn’t seem like the Browns did a good job of anticipating what they needed to do to make this draft work in their favor. This is a shame because Manziel is a good player, but without a team to back him up, the Cleveland Browns are in for a pretty tricky season. Manziel has been described as a quarterback that plays like a running back, but his skills may not be enough. The matchups for this season may see that he is the only valuable player and have even more incentive to sack the Browns quarterback.

Nets Win in First Round of Playoffs

The NFL playoffs are in full swing and the Nets have proven they are worthy opponents. They had a great win on Sunday in Toronto against the Raptors in front of 20,547 fans. At the end of the game, after they won by a thread in the last minute, Paul Pierce let out a scream and started pumping his fist in the air. He said after the game that he was in the right place at the right time to make the block on Kyle Lowry that won game 7 for the Nets at the end of this series. It came down to Pierce’s block in the end because Deron Williams missed 3 of the 6 free throws in the last few minutes of the game. This meant that the Nets only had a 104-103 lead in the last 8.8 seconds so Pierce needed to block to bring his team to victory. Garnett also contributed to the game 7 win by saving his best performance of the series for Sunday’s game. He had 12 points, 11 rebounds and one big block during this game. Regardless of who made mistakes and who brought their best game, the overall team came to a victory, which means they get to move on to their real opponents, the Miami Heat.

Joe Johnson says of taking on the Heat, “we know we can beat them.” The Nets did have success against the Miami Heat and LeBron James during the regular season this year. The Nets swept the four-game season series with Miami. This is remarkable because Miami hasn’t lost four games in a row to one team during the regular season since a former era with the Big Three. They probably won’t have the same calls they did when they played Miami during the season, but after coming off this victory in Toronto, the Nets are confident that they will win against Miami in the upcoming games.

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Recent Hire Indicates iWatch is Coming

Apple has been making a few hires recently that should make people sit up and take note. These new team members include medical technology executives that may be aiding Apple in developing biotechnology for devices like the iWatch and other wearable devices from the maker of the iPhone. In the past year, Apple has hired at least six of the most prominent experts in the field of biomedicine. Additionally, Apple has been bringing hardware experts and other medical professionals on board.

These new hires all have skills in sensor technology. This kind of focus in hiring and researching may have to do with the Chief Executive of Apple, Tim Cook making a statement last year that the sensor technology aspect of his company was ready “to explode.” It seems that Apple has it in mind to find ways for technology to sensor and work with your body to do various tasks like monitor blood sugar levels and assess nutrition in new ways that go beyond what current fitness technology is able to accomplish. Malay Gandhi is the chief strategy officer at Rock Health, a venture capital firm in San Francisco that has backed other prominent wearable tech start ups. Gandhi has been watching Apple’s hiring choices closely and notes, “this is a very specific play in the biosensing space.” Apple is really pushing to hire and make moves on a bio-sensing product because of Cook’s promise to deliver a device. Apple hasn’t made a new device since 2010, when they introduced the iPad. Investors still believe in Apple, but time is passing by and the technology needs to show that they are still issuing new products to keep investors around. By the end of this year we should see some evidence that Apple is working on a new line of devices. The watch is most likely the next product to appear. Apple has already registered the “iWatch” trademark in Japan and it will probably make its way here soon.

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The Digital Age of Dentistry

There is now an old way of dentistry and a new way. The old way means when you have an injury like a cracked tooth, you have to have a model made of the injured tooth, send the impression to a laboratory to make a crown, wait for the crown to be made, come back a week later and have the crown put in place. The old way takes time, multiple visits, and more discomfort as you wait for the injury to be mended. The new way is quicker and uses computers to help you back to health faster. Using computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technologies dentists can now make crowns in one office visit so that you don’t need to return to the office. This process works by using an intra-oral camera to take a digital scan of the mouth. This scan then appears on a screen as a 3-D image of your teeth and gums. Using that image the computer determines the ideal dimensions for the crown, which the dentist then refines. When the image of the crown is ready the digital information is transferred to a milling machine that carves out the crown from a ceramic block so it can be cemented to the tooth of the patient. This whole process takes less than two hours, a far cry from the older method that can take over a week.

Making crowns while you wait is not the only new development in the digital age of dentistry. There is now digital radiography (X-rays), which is faster than traditional X-rays and they expose patients to less radiation. There is also now a cone-beam computed tomography that is being utilized in dentist offices. This is like a CT scan for dentists that give a picture of the teeth, gums, tissues, and nerves around the mouth. Another innovation includes digital dentures that are made with computer design and digital manufacturing, similar to the process of making a digital crown. The advantage of having a digital record of the denture is that it can easily be replaced if broken or misplaced. The digital future of the dental industry is exciting and helping to innovate how we are cared for.

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