Tooth x-ray showing dead nerve Credit: Shutterstock
There’s lots of fun things you could be doing this weekend, barring unexpected misfortune—like needing an emergency root canal. It’s arguably the most dreaded dental procedure, but if a promising new type of filling pans out, no one need ever suffer through this often-painful process again.
Perhaps you are one of the fortunate few to whom the concept of a root canal is a mystery. Let me enlighten you. Dentists typically treat cavities by drilling away the decay and plugging the hole with a filling made of gold, porcelain, a composite resin (tooth-colored fillings), or an amalgam of some sort (usually an alloy of mercury, silver, copper, tin and sometimes zinc).
But those fillings can fail, and when that happens, all the soft tissue at the center of the tooth—nerves, blood vessels, that sort of thing—can get infected, and eventually die. And more often than not, the tooth does not go gently into that good night. It may start […]
Credit: www.vernkummersplumbing.com
A day after House members learned that the drinking water in one of the Congressional office buildings had been shut off due to lead contamination, a bipartisan group of 61 representatives sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency demanding that it improve its lead regulations.
The letter urges the EPA to update the Lead and Copper Rule, the regulation meant to keep the U.S.’s drinking water free from lead contamination, so that the threshold for action is lower. Currently, if a water system finds that at least 10 percent of homes tested show levels of lead at 15 parts per billion, steps have to be taken to reduce it, including replacing lead service lines and improving the use of corrosion control measures to keep lead from leeching from pipes into water.
That action level was established in 1991 in line with the best science of the time and what was considered feasible. But, as the letter notes, “Corrosion control technologies and our understanding of the negative impacts of lead at low doses have advanced significantly since that time.” As it points […]
Antwain Nelson held various jobs in the construction field for several years, but the work never felt fulfilling. Then an opportunity to volunteer in low-income neighborhoods introduced him to his current job and, he says, a clear career path.
“The first day, I fell in love with it,” says Nelson, 25, an installer of solar energy systems and a lifelong resident of Washington DC. The people he works with, he says, feel “like another family to me”.
Nelson is one of thousands of new hires in the US solar industry, which has become the fastest growing sector in the energy business. Solar employment has more than doubled since 2010, reaching 209,000 employees by November 2015, according to The Solar Foundation, a nonprofit that offers research and educational programs to promote solar. The industry created about 35,000 of those jobs in 2015 alone.
In a report released in November, the foundation projects another 30,000 new jobs through the end of 2016 – a 14.7% annual increase, or 13 times faster […]
