The lollipop is infused with a natural ingredient found in licorice that kills the primary bacterium causing tooth decay.

What Willy Wonka did for chocolate, UCLA microbiologist Wenyuan Shi is doing for lollipops.
Because of Shi, thousands of orange-flavored lollipops are rolling out of a factory in Grand Rapids, Mich., into the hands of people eager to lick them for one reason only. Shi and his lab team at the School of Dentistry have managed to make candy that’s actually good for your teeth, Physorg.com reported.
The orange-flavored, sugar-free lollipop they devised is infused with a natural ingredient found in licorice that kills the primary bacterium causing tooth decay, Streptococcus mutans.
Marketed as Dr. John’s Herbal Candy, the lollipop, now available for purchase through a candy manufacturer that licenses the technology from UCLA, is the first therapeutic developed by Shi.
But he has many more in the works to target bacteria wreaking havoc in the nose, ear and gut, to name just a few.
It all emerges from a vision the microbiologist had eight years ago to apply a medical approach to dentistry--to identify the decay-causing pathogens among the 700 kinds of bacteria living in the human mouth, track their presence and then target them with antimicrobial “smart bombs“ that he and his lab would engineer to kill the bad bacteria without harming the good.
And he’s also working on kits to test for these devilish pathogens. “Part of my wild dream is that one day you will walk into the dentist’s office and give a saliva sample to be tested, just as you would give urine and blood samples to doctors,“ said Shi, a professor with joint appointments in UCLA’s dental and medical schools.

An asteroid once thought to be on a collision course with Mars passed the Red Planet today without incident.
Astronomers first estimated that asteroid 2007 WD5 had as high as a 3.6 percent chance of striking the planet. Newer observations kept lowering the odds for the 164-foot space rock until Jan. 9, when NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) program office effectively ruled out chances of an impact, Space.com said.
“Mars sees these kinds of near-miss encounters every ten or twenty years, but the impact rate for asteroids this size is about once in a thousand years,“ said Steve Chesley, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.
Astronomers had hoped the fleet of spacecraft orbiting Mars would get a chance to observe the asteroid plowing into the Martian surface.
The subsequent crater would have roughly equaled the size of the Meteor Crater that formed in northern Arizona 50,000 years ago, with a 0.5-mile diameter.
Such an impact would have also allowed scientists to study the dust cloud from the impact.
“We were hoping for a spectacular show to reveal a lot,“ Chesley said. “We’ve actually never seen a significant impact on a terrestrial planet.“
Mars is a smaller and harder target for space rocks to hit when compared with Earth, but about five times as many asteroids cross the Martian orbit, according to Chesley. 2007 WD5’s path around the sun ranges from just outside Earth’s orbit to the outer edge of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but will not impact with either Mars or Earth in the next century, JPL researchers said.
The asteroid missed Mars by a distance of approximately 6.5 Mars radii.
Similar near misses occur with Earth. And similarly, astronomers sometimes give odds on a possible impact and then, with further observations, reduce the odds to zero.
In fact, the Mars flyby occurred a day after a 500-foot asteroid flew by Earth at a distance somewhat greater than from the Earth to the Moon.
Chesley and other astronomers considered having one of the Martian rovers eyeball the passing 2007 WD5, but judged the task too difficult for the robotic explorers. None of the orbiting spacecraft turned their cameras or other equipment on the passing rock, either.
“After we knew it was going to miss, it’s really a pretty ordinary asteroid cruising around the solar system,“ Chesley said.

People with blue eyes owe the color of their eyes to a genetic mutation that likely occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, researchers say.
Scientists believe they have tracked down the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans on the planet today, Telegraph.co.uk said.
“Originally, we all had brown eyes“, said Prof Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen, who led the team.
Blue eye color most likely originated from the near east area or northwest part of the Black Sea region, where the great agriculture migration to the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about sixÐ10,000 years ago.
“That is my best guess,“ he said. “It could be the northern part of Afghanistan.“
The mutation affected a gene called OCA2 and “literally ’turned off’ the ability to produce brown eyes“, he says.
OCA2 is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to hair, eyes and skin.
The mutation in the adjacent gene does not switch off the OCA gene entirely but limits its action, reducing the production of melanin in the iris of the eye--“diluting“ brown eyes to blue.
If the OCA2 gene had been completely turned off, those who inherited this mutation would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin color--albino.
For the study, Prof Eiberg’s team examined DNA in blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, India, Denmark and Turkey.
His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Prof Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being one of those responsible for eye color.
“They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA. From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,“ said Prof Eiberg, who reports the work in the journal Human Genetics.

Polycarbonate plastic bottles released a known environmental pollutant 55 times more quickly when filled with boiling water.

Hot liquids dramatically increase the amount of harmful chemicals released by plastic bottles, according to a study.
Scientists found that polycarbonate plastic bottles released a known environmental pollutant 55 times more quickly when filled with boiling water, Guardian wrote.
Polycarbonate is used to make everything from compact discs to milk bottles for babies. The plastic is made from bisphenol A, a chemical produced in large volumes across the world. But over time, the plastic leaches its raw ingredient back into the environment.
“There are a lot of concerns surrounding bisphenol A,“ said David Santillo, senior scientist at the Greenpeace research laboratory in Exeter. “It is a hormone disrupter able to mimic and interfere with hormone systems in animals.“
In the experiment, Scott Belcher, of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, wanted to work out how bisphenol A leaked out of polycarbonates and whether the temperature of the liquid stored in the bottle affected the rate.
“Previous studies have shown that if you repeatedly scrub, dish-wash and boil polycarbonate baby bottles, they release bisphenol A.
But we wanted to know if ’normal’ use caused increased release from something that we all use, and to identify what was the most important factor that impacts release,“ he said.
Belcher took reusable water bottles and tested them for seven days with room temperature water and then boiling water, simulating normal usage during backpacking, mountaineering and other outdoor adventure activities.
He found that boiling water released bisphenol A from the bottles up to 55 times more quickly than the lower-temperature water.
The results, published in the latest edition of the journal Toxicology Letters, found that with room temperature water the rate of release from individual bottles ranged from 0.2 to 0.8 nanograms of bisphenol A an hour. After exposure to boiling water, rates increased to 8 to 32 nanograms an hour.
“A nanogram is a fairly small amount but, given that a lot of hormones work at levels far below that, even if it’s not as potent as a natural hormone, you are in the range there which could be contributing to adverse effects,“ said Santillo.
He added that Belcher’s research should renew calls to develop alternative materials for baby milk bottles.

The new material could help extend the working life of batteries as a way to turn them off when not in use.

Sculpting a surface composed of tightly packed nanostructures that resemble tiny nails, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers and their colleagues from Bell Laboratories have created a material that can repel almost any liquid.
Add a jolt of electricity, and the liquid on the surface slips past the heads of the nanonails and spreads out between their shanks, wetting the surface completely, ScienceDaily reported.
The new material, which was reported this month in Langmuir, a journal of the American Chemical Society, could find use in biomedical applications such as “lab-on-a-chip“ technology, the manufacture of self-cleaning surfaces, and could help extend the working life of batteries as a way to turn them off when not in use.
UW-Madison mechanical engineers Tom Krupenkin and J. Ashley Taylor and their team etched a silicon wafer to create a forest of conductive silicon shanks and non-conducting silicon oxide heads. Intriguingly, the ability of the surface of the structure to repel water, oil, and solvents rests on the nanonail geometry.
“It turns out that what’s important is not the chemistry of the surface, but the topography of the surface,“ Krupenkin explains, noting that the overhang of the nail head is what gives his novel surface its dual personality.
A surface of posts, he notes, creates a platform so rough at the nanoscale that “liquid only touches the surface at the extreme ends of the posts. It’s almost like sitting on a layer of air.“