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The tooth-rebuilding technique developed at King’s College London does away with fillings and instead encourages teeth to repair themselves.

Tooth decay is normally removed by drilling, after which the cavity is filled with a material such as amalgam or composite resin.

The new treatment, called Electrically Accelerated and Enhanced Remineralisation (EAER), accelerates the natural movement of calcium and phosphate minerals into the damaged tooth.

A two-step process first prepares the damaged area of enamel, then uses a tiny electric current to push minerals into the repair site. It could be available within three years.

Professor Nigel Pitts, from King’s College London’s Dental Institute, said: “The way we treat teeth today is not ideal. When we repair a tooth by putting in a filling, that tooth enters a cycle of drilling and refilling as, ultimately, each ‘repair’ fails.

“Not only is our device kinder to the patient and better for their teeth, but it’s expected to be at least as cost-effective as current dental treatments. Along with fighting tooth decay, our device can also be used to whiten teeth.”

Dave Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said when you add up all of the nation’s unfunded liabilities, the national debt is more than three times the number generally advertised.

Akio Toyoda, the company’s president, announced the car manufacturer is launching a research company in Silicon Valley to develop AI and robotics for use in its cars.

The Toyota Research Institute will, according to a company press release, “make driving accessible to everyone, regardless of ability,” improve safety by embedding AI in cars, and help to discover new materials.

Following each incident (usually occurring late at night and involving two or three separate fiber cuts) residents couldn’t make land or mobile calls, not even to 911, or send texts or emails. Hospital records in some instances were inaccessible. Credit cards and A.T.M.s didn’t work. And forget about Googling, watching Netflix or remotely turning on a coffee maker. (For security reasons, Lawrence Livermore declined to say how the cuts affected its operations.)

When we talk about the Internet, we talk about clouds and ether. But the Internet is not amorphous. You may access it wirelessly, but ultimately you’re relying on a bunch of physical cables that are vulnerable to attack. It’s something that’s been largely forgotten in the lather over cybersecurity. The threat is not only malicious code flowing through the pipes but also, and perhaps more critically, the pipes themselves.

Most worrisome are the throughways and junctures that handle enormous amounts of Internet traffic. It would be as if a major interstate highway or crucial interchange were closed and all the traffic was forced onto side streets. There would be gridlock, and some of those side streets might collapse under the weight. Data transfer would slow significantly or come to a halt, as has happened in Northern California.

Surprisingly, there isn’t even a good map of the Internet’s highways and byways to clearly show locations that, if taken out, would severely hamper the system. “Everybody assumes somebody knows, but after a while you find out nobody actually knows,” said Paul Barford, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin who has made it his mission to find out where the vulnerabilities are.

He recently completed a map of the United States’ long-haul Internet infrastructure — stretches that span at least 30 miles and connect population centers of at least 100,000 people. It took him four years of cajoling information from commercial broadband providers and collecting public records to come up with a reasonably reliable map. Notably, his research was partly funded by the Department of Homeland Security and can be accessed only by D.H.S.-approved researchers.

“What we’re trying to avoid is giving bad guys a map to do bad things,” Professor Barford said. “Now that we can see the possible pinch points in the U.S., we are looking at ways to mitigate them.”

Security experts and networking engineers said they were most concerned about where major networks converge. These are called Internet exchange points, or I.X.P.s, where networks come together like highway interchanges to trade traffic, which is known as peering.

There are about 80 I.X.P.s in the United States but only a handful, including ones in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle and outside Washington, are vital interchanges for domestic as well as international traffic coming from undersea cables from abroad (which are also vulnerable to cuts by mislaid anchors or submarine sabotage).

Plugging into these major hubs are hundreds of Internet and mobile service providers, as well as content delivery networks such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. If taken out by natural disaster (earthquake, hurricane) or a strategic attack, much of the United States, if not much of the world, would have hindered Internet access or none at all, depending on the severity and sophistication of the strikes.

One-year-old Layla Richards, from London, had incurable aggressive leukaemia only five months ago.

Doctors used “designer immune cells” to fight the cancer and say her improvement was “almost a miracle”.

It is too soon to know if she has been cured, but her progress already marks a huge moment for the field.

…

Medical staff, in conjunction with the biotech company Cellectis, rapidly gained permission to try a highly experimental therapy that had been trialled only in mice.

The treatment – designer immune cells – were the product of cutting-edge advances in gene editing.

Previous therapies have tried to add new genes to correct a defect whereas this one edited those already there.
Molecular scissors

Microscopic scissors – technically known as Talens – were used to precisely engineer the DNA inside a donor’s immune cells.

The cells were designed to seek out and kill only leukaemia cells and to make them invisible to the strong drugs given to patients.

The designer cells were then injected into Layla and she also needed a second bone marrow transplant to restore her immune system.

For 127 years, the New York-based company has been churning out the lightweight metal used in everything from beverage cans to airplanes, once making it a symbol of U.S. industrial might. Now, with prices languishing near six-year lows, it’s wiping out almost a third of domestic operating capacity, Harbor Intelligence estimates. If prices don’t recover, the researcher predicts almost all U.S. smelting plants will close by next year.

The body of Mikhail Lesin was found in a room in the plush Dupont Circle hotel on Thursday morning, the Russian embassy in Washington said, confirming reports by Russian news agencies that Lesin, 57, had died. State-owned RIA Novosti reported that Lesin died of a heart attack, citing a spokesman for his family.

Washington police have opened a “death investigation”, lieutenant Sean Conboy told the Guardian. Conboy declined to identify the subject of the investigation but said detectives were looking into the circumstances of the man’s death. Police found a body at the hotel room at about 11.30am on Friday, he said.

The Russian agency Tass reported that early investigation did not find any signs of violent death, and quoted a police spokesman, Sean Hickman, as saying security had not seen anything suspicious. Hickman said the nature of the investigation could change, depending on what was found the scene and after an examination of the body.

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, the Kremlin-directed news agency tweeted: “Lesin is dead. It’s impossible to believe. Please, everyone who knew and didn’t know him, remember him well. He was an absolutely unique man.”

RT credited Lesin with “inspiring [its] creation”, and suggested without any citation that “Lesin had been suffering from a prolonged unidentified illness”.

After the fall of communism in the early 1990s, Lesin set up Video International, which became a multi-billion dollar advertising agency and remains one of Russia’s biggest.

He served as the country’s press minister from 1999 to 2004 and was Putin’s media adviser for the following five years, before becoming a senior executive at Gazprom-Media, Russia’s largest media group, in 2013. He resigned a year later.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement that the president “highly appreciates the enormous contribution Mikhail Lesin made to the formation of the modern Russian media”, according to Tass.

Instead of landing from the east over Inglewood, planes begin flying from the west and over the ocean to keep noise levels down, but due to secret military operations, the airspace over the Pacific is closed to incoming flights for the next week.

“We clearly understand that neighbors and communities east of the airport will experience noise and we apologize for that,” said Nancy Castles, LAX public relations director.

The military is not saying what exactly is causing the change, and LAX claims it’s also in the dark. Castles said all they know is planes can’t be flying at low altitudes to our west.

Six years ago, ABC7 cameras captured a military operation in downtown LA. Helicopters were seen swooping between high-rises, close enough that residents were able to see armed soldiers in camouflage outside their window.

The programme has been running for 10 years under a law described as “vague” by the government’s terror watchdog.

It emerged as Home Secretary Theresa May unveiled a draft bill governing spying on communications by the authorities.

If it becomes law, the internet activity of everyone in Britain will be held for a year by service providers.

Police and intelligence officers will then be able to see the names of sites suspected criminals have visited, without a warrant.