I have a problem. And like most of my problems, I was the last one to know about it. In fact, I had considered this problem an attribute until last Saturday night when I was strolling through the outdoor shopping and dining district of Old Town Pasadena enjoying a fruitful, funny conversation with my companion Anne Hathaway. (Ok, it wasn’t really Anne Hathaway, but since my actual companion wouldn’t appreciate having her name immortalized in this blogumn, I figured I’d pick a pseudonym that could bring in some extra search engine traffic.) It was just after 10pm and suddenly every store front –from quaint coffee shops to high-end wine bars to Yogurtariums– transformed like some brick and mortar werewolf into make-shift night clubs with obligatory velvet ropes and roided-up door men hairier than Cerberus. Turning onto a slightly more quiet side street, Anne Hathaway and I passed two women in their early 20s who were squeezed into club wear of such suffocating tightness that their female forms resembled nothing less than two freshly fed pythons. As I watched them wobbling forth in their sky-scraper heels like sailors after seven years at sea, I quickly concocted twin backstories featuring a whistle stop tour of heartbreaks, disappointments and diminished expectations. “I feel bad for them. They seem just so desperate to impress,” I said in a tone of genuine pity as opposed to my usual snark attack. “That’s really judgmental. How do you know they’re desperate and sad?”  Anne Hathaway snapped back. In an effort to save face, I mumbled something to Anne Hathaway about how she was right and then asked her to reveal some plot spoilers from The Dark Knight Rises (Ka-ching! – Take that Google!) And that is how I learned about my problem: ...

Apparently, some scientist at UCLA has come up with a cavity-fighting lollipop. I can only assume that he wants to get kissed full-on the mouth by me the first time we meet, and I’m impressed that he went to such extremes to make it happen. Story as reported at TheFutureOfThings.com after the jump? . “Professor Wenyuan Shi, Chairman of the Oral Biology Department at the UCLA School of Dentistry, was looking for a new therapeutic approach to dentistry. He decided to look at Chinese herbal medicines, hoping to develop an effective, inexpensive, easy-to-produce nutritional supplement. Over the years, more than 5,000 Chinese herbs have been used to create and refine more than 100,000 formulas to fight various types of infections. After determining the top 400 most commonly prescribed and effective herbs in traditional Chinese medicine, Professor Shi used an anti-cavity biological assay developed at UCLA to test them for anti-microbial effectiveness against S. mutans. Finally, he determined that an extract of licorice root (Glycyrrhiza uralensis) is effective against tooth-decaying bacteria, providing the scientific basis for the ancient practice of chewing licorice root. “This was particularly charming because in both Chinese and in Western cultures, people have been chewing it maybe for the taste, but it also has a lot of good health reasons. It stimulates saliva flows, has anti-bacterial properties and keeps bacteria from adhering to your teeth”, explained Professor Shi. C3 Jian is currently working with a candy manufacturer on the healthy lollipop’s production. It is recommended to eat one lollipop after breakfast and another one before going to bed at night for a period of ten days. Then, in order to maintain the treatment’s effectiveness, one should eat a lollipop about 2-4 times a year. “The difficulty there is that the support staff...