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I actually find these articles depressing because it seems like nothing like this ever ultimately comes to fruition. I'm guessing these "breakthroughs" have al

I actually find these articles depressing because it seems like nothing like this ever ultimately comes to fruition. I'm guessing these "breakthroughs" have always been just around the corner. I recall having a conversation with my dentist almost 20 years ago about things that were up and coming that were about to make our lives a lot easier in terms of saving and strengthening and building tooth enamel but none of what he described ever came.

hackits 10y ago
I would of liked to been told `Nothing is going to come on the market` instead of `All this wonderful technology is going to solve any problems you're going to have`. The latter results in careless behavior, the former results more careful behavior. Personally as someone as a kid was going up out-back Australia who's parents and care giver didn't put fluoride tablets into the water because it caused the water to `taste bad`. As a result I have screwed up teeth. Discussed this with this with my parents years later. Their reasoning for my teeth problem was poor diet and eating sugary food (Completely ignoring the fact they tossed the tablets into the bin). Fast forward into the future with a family and two children I don't have soft drink, fruit juice in the house. Who would of known, all the kids teeth are great since our last dentist visit.
- poikniok 10y ago
  Fluoride decreases IQ significantly, be thankful that at least you are intelligent, albeit with bad teeth.
  - sathackr 10y ago
    Source?
    - vanattab 10y ago
      The practice of fluoride in drinking water does seem to be getting some push back of late. I did a quick google scholar search for "fluoride drinking water" and found some articles on both sides.
      - delecti 10y ago
        So does the practice of vaccinations, and without strong evidence that it's not safe, I'm inclined to take the lack of such evidence as significant, in light of the abundance of evidence that it seems to be helpful.
    - throwaway91111 10y ago
      While I can't source the IQ claim, the evidence "showing" that fluoridation is safe to drink (as opposed to measuring by tooth health) is fairly scarce. OTOH I've heard teeth are especially poor around Portland Oregon where they don't fluoride the water. I'd simply say the jury is still out. I tend to think of iq claims specifically with a particularly large grain of salt: it's an index of society that people follow closely and is related to many, many factors.
    - MagnumOpus 10y ago
      https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-children...
  - wishinghand 10y ago
    Aw shucks, I'm merely intelligent, rather than a genius?
  - mrob 10y ago
    Regardless of whether fluoride is a serious risk or not, it seems ridiculous to take a topical drug systemically. Fluoride works by inorganic reactions with the teeth themselves. There's no benefit to flooding the whole body with it. It's reasonable to be suspicious of water fluoridation when the same benefit can be achieved with fluoridated toothpastes, which deliver the fluoride only where it's needed.
    - popinman322 10y ago
      As someone who grew up on well water with no fluoride in it I can confirm that my teeth are looking fine after all these years of regular dental checkups and twice daily tooth-brushing.
      - olejorgenb 10y ago
        Fluoride occurs naturally (in varying concentrations) in water. Water with high natural concentrations is how we found out fluoride prevents tooth decay in the first place.
    - olejorgenb 10y ago
      That is a good point, but according to http://www.ada.org/~/media/ADA/Member%20Center/FIles/fluoridation_facts.ashx http://www.ada.org/~/media/ADA/Member%20Center/FIles/fluorid... (p.10) "Systemic fluorides can also give topical protection because ingested fluoride is present in saliva, which continually bathes the teeth providing a reservoir of fluoride that can be incorporated into the tooth surface to prevent decay." It also says fluoride ingested during teeth-formation is incorporated into the teeth.
  - pasquinelli 10y ago
    i'd rather be stupid than have bad teeth.
- user837387 10y ago
  Didn't you use toothpaste with fluoride? Or is that not enough?
  - hackits 10y ago
    Used toothpaste with fluoride. Though the fridge was constantly stoked with sugar, fruit juice, bread and bread toppings. Kid of ironic that my Mum is a dietitian who is mobility obese.
    - test1235 10y ago
      >mobility obese morbidly?
      - hackits 10y ago
        Stupid auto correct, yes.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    Reasearch indicates that fluorided water is better at covering the surface area of your teeth--brushing with toothpaste mostly removes the layer of plaque and allows the active ingredient to work better. It's actually phenomenal how little dental research has ever reached consumer behavior or dental care.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      Instead of fluoridated water, you can always just use fluoride mouthwash/rinse which many dentists now recommend to be used daily. Personally I only drink RO water as tap water tastes bad to me, but I use a fluoride mouthwash (Crest) every night after brushing and flossing.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Most of Europe and Japan doesn't fluoridate their water and they don't have notably worse dental outcomes. It really has to do with toothbrushing and diet. Water fluoridation is just a way to get to the people who refuse to brush their teeth.
  - stplsd 10y ago
    I think genetics have a part too. My grandmother was deported to Siberia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithuania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithu...) for 20 years where they have 200 grams of bread a day at best and never brushed her teeth in her life and never had a tooth filling or missing tooth before her retirement, and I have half my teeth missing and I am only 30 years old. Fuck my life.
    - torinmr 10y ago
      Could that also be related to diet? I'm guessing your grandmother practically never ate sugar if she was living on 200 grams of bread a day. I've also heard that early modern humans had fairly good teeth for their age despite the presumed lack of dental care, presumably also due to differences in their diet from us.
      - Cerium 10y ago
        Diet is super important. I used to drink orange juice every day. I got a cavity every 6 months. I have stopped drinking orange juice and have not had a cavity since.
      - filoeleven 10y ago
        I just heard a radio piece about how basically all humans had Hollywood smiles (where the teeth lined up perfectly) until the Industrial Revolution, when our jaws began to shrink and there was no longer enough room for all the teeth. I didn't get to hear the part where they discussed/hypothesized whether the changes were due to diet or environment or something else.
    - 10y ago
- robbiep 10y ago
  I grew up in rural Australia, my parents fed us fluoride tablets when we were young. 1-2 fillings between 3 siblings, although I'm fairly sure our bore had a bit of fluoride in it. I'm sorry you missed out on that, teeth problems are shitty
  - Ftuuky 10y ago
    Same here but in Switzerland. 4 fillings between 3 brothers (2 are mine).
advertising 10y ago
I remember reading an article about these scientists experimenting with blue light and the larger capacity to store data. ~15 years later blu-ray came out. All hope is not lost.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I remember when SSDs were always around the corner.
- astrodust 10y ago
  It takes a lot of time to turn a laboratory discovery into a reliably working prototype, then longer still for the industry to agree on standards and branding, and even longer to ramp up mass-manufacturing and get the distribution chain working. We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized. If you want to know what the near future holds look at what was discovered thirty years ago.
  - eganist 10y ago
    > We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized. I can appreciate this example, though in the specific context of teleportation, there'll probably be a few decades tacked on to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising from the question of whether or not the person arriving out of the other end is in fact the same person. (I'm of the position that it doesn't matter, but still... anyway, this entire thought was just a tangent off an example)
    - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
      You say that now, but when you step up to the machine with the knowledge that you are about to cease to exist, while somewhere else a perfect copy of you gets to go about living your life, I bet you change your mind.
MichailP 10y ago
I had a similar talk with my dentist, where I was optimistic about future and he put me back into reality. He took a piece of paper and started drawing tooth in its complexity - nerves, blood supply, several completely different and 'living' layers (somehow I pictured teeth as something rather simple, like a piece of hard stone inserted into gums), and then he said, do you think a simple chemical can rebuild all this interplaying complexity?
- systems 10y ago
  do you think bits and bytes can run the global economy .. plus maybe its a complex chemical ..
- prostoalex 10y ago
  To be fair, fillings don't rebuild the complexity either.
epimetheus 10y ago
Do you have a site for this 20 years ago claim? The first I've seen is one about 10 years ago, in the UK.
johnchristopher 10y ago
Previously, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274183 :)
nobodyman 10y ago
It's funny. I often have the same reaction as you. Yet last summer I went to the dentist to have an old filling replaced with a crown. They took a 3D scan of my teeth and used that scan to mill a crown on site in about an hour. It fit perfectly and I could scarcely distinguish it from the rest of my real teeth. 20 years ago, all of this would sound like science fiction to me.
- sah2ed 10y ago
  But I bet the cost of the procedure left a sizeable hole in your pocket ;).
mikekchar 10y ago
On the plus side, drug patents are 20 years, so there is considerable incentive to get something out the door somewhere in that time frame. Hmm... maybe I'm not so anti-patent as I thought ;-)
dv_dt 10y ago
I think it's only really depressing if an advancement is stuck idly behind something non-technical like lack of capital, or legal wrangling, or being acquired and shelved. Other than that, if there were real technical bumps that sidelined the advancement, well that's just part of the process. What one really wonders at, is technology where there were technical failures, but were really a small distance away from success for lack of combination the right bit of information to push it over the edge - but are now locked away in storage in some proprietary corner somewhere.

hackits 10y ago

I would of liked to been told `Nothing is going to come on the market` instead of `All this wonderful technology is going to solve any problems you're going to have`. The latter results in careless behavior, the former results more careful behavior. Personally as someone as a kid was going up out-back Australia who's parents and care giver didn't put fluoride tablets into the water because it caused the water to `taste bad`. As a result I have screwed up teeth. Discussed this with this with my parents years later. Their reasoning for my teeth problem was poor diet and eating sugary food (Completely ignoring the fact they tossed the tablets into the bin). Fast forward into the future with a family and two children I don't have soft drink, fruit juice in the house. Who would of known, all the kids teeth are great since our last dentist visit.

poikniok 10y ago
Fluoride decreases IQ significantly, be thankful that at least you are intelligent, albeit with bad teeth.
- sathackr 10y ago
  Source?
  - vanattab 10y ago
    The practice of fluoride in drinking water does seem to be getting some push back of late. I did a quick google scholar search for "fluoride drinking water" and found some articles on both sides.
    - delecti 10y ago
      So does the practice of vaccinations, and without strong evidence that it's not safe, I'm inclined to take the lack of such evidence as significant, in light of the abundance of evidence that it seems to be helpful.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    While I can't source the IQ claim, the evidence "showing" that fluoridation is safe to drink (as opposed to measuring by tooth health) is fairly scarce. OTOH I've heard teeth are especially poor around Portland Oregon where they don't fluoride the water. I'd simply say the jury is still out. I tend to think of iq claims specifically with a particularly large grain of salt: it's an index of society that people follow closely and is related to many, many factors.
  - MagnumOpus 10y ago
    https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-children...
- wishinghand 10y ago
  Aw shucks, I'm merely intelligent, rather than a genius?
- mrob 10y ago
  Regardless of whether fluoride is a serious risk or not, it seems ridiculous to take a topical drug systemically. Fluoride works by inorganic reactions with the teeth themselves. There's no benefit to flooding the whole body with it. It's reasonable to be suspicious of water fluoridation when the same benefit can be achieved with fluoridated toothpastes, which deliver the fluoride only where it's needed.
  - popinman322 10y ago
    As someone who grew up on well water with no fluoride in it I can confirm that my teeth are looking fine after all these years of regular dental checkups and twice daily tooth-brushing.
    - olejorgenb 10y ago
      Fluoride occurs naturally (in varying concentrations) in water. Water with high natural concentrations is how we found out fluoride prevents tooth decay in the first place.
  - olejorgenb 10y ago
    That is a good point, but according to http://www.ada.org/~/media/ADA/Member%20Center/FIles/fluoridation_facts.ashx http://www.ada.org/~/media/ADA/Member%20Center/FIles/fluorid... (p.10) "Systemic fluorides can also give topical protection because ingested fluoride is present in saliva, which continually bathes the teeth providing a reservoir of fluoride that can be incorporated into the tooth surface to prevent decay." It also says fluoride ingested during teeth-formation is incorporated into the teeth.
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  i'd rather be stupid than have bad teeth.
user837387 10y ago
Didn't you use toothpaste with fluoride? Or is that not enough?
- hackits 10y ago
  Used toothpaste with fluoride. Though the fridge was constantly stoked with sugar, fruit juice, bread and bread toppings. Kid of ironic that my Mum is a dietitian who is mobility obese.
  - test1235 10y ago
    >mobility obese morbidly?
    - hackits 10y ago
      Stupid auto correct, yes.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  Reasearch indicates that fluorided water is better at covering the surface area of your teeth--brushing with toothpaste mostly removes the layer of plaque and allows the active ingredient to work better. It's actually phenomenal how little dental research has ever reached consumer behavior or dental care.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    Instead of fluoridated water, you can always just use fluoride mouthwash/rinse which many dentists now recommend to be used daily. Personally I only drink RO water as tap water tastes bad to me, but I use a fluoride mouthwash (Crest) every night after brushing and flossing.
kalleboo 10y ago
Most of Europe and Japan doesn't fluoridate their water and they don't have notably worse dental outcomes. It really has to do with toothbrushing and diet. Water fluoridation is just a way to get to the people who refuse to brush their teeth.
- stplsd 10y ago
  I think genetics have a part too. My grandmother was deported to Siberia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithuania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithu...) for 20 years where they have 200 grams of bread a day at best and never brushed her teeth in her life and never had a tooth filling or missing tooth before her retirement, and I have half my teeth missing and I am only 30 years old. Fuck my life.
  - torinmr 10y ago
    Could that also be related to diet? I'm guessing your grandmother practically never ate sugar if she was living on 200 grams of bread a day. I've also heard that early modern humans had fairly good teeth for their age despite the presumed lack of dental care, presumably also due to differences in their diet from us.
    - Cerium 10y ago
      Diet is super important. I used to drink orange juice every day. I got a cavity every 6 months. I have stopped drinking orange juice and have not had a cavity since.
    - filoeleven 10y ago
      I just heard a radio piece about how basically all humans had Hollywood smiles (where the teeth lined up perfectly) until the Industrial Revolution, when our jaws began to shrink and there was no longer enough room for all the teeth. I didn't get to hear the part where they discussed/hypothesized whether the changes were due to diet or environment or something else.
  - 10y ago
robbiep 10y ago
I grew up in rural Australia, my parents fed us fluoride tablets when we were young. 1-2 fillings between 3 siblings, although I'm fairly sure our bore had a bit of fluoride in it. I'm sorry you missed out on that, teeth problems are shitty
- Ftuuky 10y ago
  Same here but in Switzerland. 4 fillings between 3 brothers (2 are mine).

advertising 10y ago

I remember reading an article about these scientists experimenting with blue light and the larger capacity to store data. ~15 years later blu-ray came out. All hope is not lost.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
I remember when SSDs were always around the corner.
astrodust 10y ago
It takes a lot of time to turn a laboratory discovery into a reliably working prototype, then longer still for the industry to agree on standards and branding, and even longer to ramp up mass-manufacturing and get the distribution chain working. We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized. If you want to know what the near future holds look at what was discovered thirty years ago.
- eganist 10y ago
  > We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized. I can appreciate this example, though in the specific context of teleportation, there'll probably be a few decades tacked on to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising from the question of whether or not the person arriving out of the other end is in fact the same person. (I'm of the position that it doesn't matter, but still... anyway, this entire thought was just a tangent off an example)
  - RhodesianHunter 10y ago
    You say that now, but when you step up to the machine with the knowledge that you are about to cease to exist, while somewhere else a perfect copy of you gets to go about living your life, I bet you change your mind.

MichailP 10y ago

I had a similar talk with my dentist, where I was optimistic about future and he put me back into reality. He took a piece of paper and started drawing tooth in its complexity - nerves, blood supply, several completely different and 'living' layers (somehow I pictured teeth as something rather simple, like a piece of hard stone inserted into gums), and then he said, do you think a simple chemical can rebuild all this interplaying complexity?

systems 10y ago
do you think bits and bytes can run the global economy .. plus maybe its a complex chemical ..
prostoalex 10y ago
To be fair, fillings don't rebuild the complexity either.

epimetheus 10y ago

Do you have a site for this 20 years ago claim? The first I've seen is one about 10 years ago, in the UK.

johnchristopher 10y ago

Previously, on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13274183 :)

nobodyman 10y ago

It's funny. I often have the same reaction as you. Yet last summer I went to the dentist to have an old filling replaced with a crown. They took a 3D scan of my teeth and used that scan to mill a crown on site in about an hour. It fit perfectly and I could scarcely distinguish it from the rest of my real teeth. 20 years ago, all of this would sound like science fiction to me.

sah2ed 10y ago
But I bet the cost of the procedure left a sizeable hole in your pocket ;).

mikekchar 10y ago

On the plus side, drug patents are 20 years, so there is considerable incentive to get something out the door somewhere in that time frame. Hmm... maybe I'm not so anti-patent as I thought ;-)

dv_dt 10y ago

I think it's only really depressing if an advancement is stuck idly behind something non-technical like lack of capital, or legal wrangling, or being acquired and shelved. Other than that, if there were real technical bumps that sidelined the advancement, well that's just part of the process. What one really wonders at, is technology where there were technical failures, but were really a small distance away from success for lack of combination the right bit of information to push it over the edge - but are now locked away in storage in some proprietary corner somewhere.