The Singing Dentures Of Manchester And Other Places
Any radio amateur will tell you about the spectre of TVI, of their transmissions being inadvertently demodulated by the smallest of non-linearity in the neighbouring antenna systems, and spewing forth from the speakers of all and sundry. It’s very much a thing that the most unlikely of circuits can function as radio receivers, but… teeth? [Ringway Manchester] investigates tales of musical dental work.
Going through a series of news reports over the decades, including one of Lucille Ball uncovering a hidden Japanese spy transmitter, it’s something all experts who have looked at the issue have concluded there is little evidence for. It was also investigated by Mythbusters. But it’s an alluring tale, so is it entirely fabricated? What we can say is that teeth are sensitive to sound, not in themselves, but because the jaw provides a good path bringing vibrations to the region of the ear. And it’s certainly possible that the active chemical environment surrounding a metal filling in a patient’s mouth could give rise to electrical non-linearities. But could a human body in an ordinary RF environment act as a good enough antenna to provide enough energy for something to happen? We have our doubts.
It’s a perennial story (even in fiction), though, and we’re guessing that proof will come over the coming decades. If the tales of dental music and DJs continue after AM (or Long Wave in Europe) transmissions have been turned off, then it’s likely they’re more in the mind than in the mouth. If not, then we might have missed a radio phenomenon. The video is below the break.
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Dental orthopantomogram: Temehetmebmk, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Hackaday Links: October 12, 2025
We’ve probably all seen some old newsreel or documentary from The Before Times where the narrator, using his best Mid-Atlantic accent, described those newfangled computers as “thinking machines,” or better yet, “electronic brains.” It was an apt description, at least considering that the intended audience had no other frame of reference at a time when the most complex machine they were familiar with was a telephone. But what if the whole “brain” thing could be taken more literally? We’ll have to figure that out soon if these computers powered by miniature human brains end up getting any traction.
The so-called “organoid bioprocessors” come from a Swiss outfit called FinalSpark, and if you’re picturing little pulsating human brains in petri dishes connected to wires, you’ll have to guess again. The organoids, which are grown from human skin cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells and then cultured into human neurons, only have about 10,000 cells per blob. That makes them a fraction of a millimeter in diameter, an important limit since they have no blood supply and must absorb nutrients from their culture medium, and even though they have none of the neuronal complexity of a brain, they’re still capable of some interesting stuff. FinalSpark has a live feed to one of its organoid computing cells on the website; the output looks a little like an EEG, which makes sense if you think about it. We’re not sure where this technology is going, aside from playing Pong, but if you put aside the creep-factor, this is pretty neat stuff.
We thought once 3I/Atlas, our latest interstellar visitor, ducked behind the Sun on its quick trip through the solar system, that things would quiet down a bit, at least in terms of stories about how it’s an alien space probe or something. Don’t get us wrong, we’d dearly love to have it be a probe sent by another civilization to explore our neck of the galactic woods, and at this point we’d even be fine with it being the vanguard of a Vogon Constructor Fleet. But now the best view of the thing is from Mars, leading to stories about the strange cylindrical thing in the Martian sky. The photo was apparently captured on October 4 by one of the navigation cameras on the Perseverance rover, which alone is a pretty neat trick since those cameras are optimized for looking at the ground. But the image is clearly not of a cylinder floating menacingly over the Martian surface; rather, as Avi Loeb explains, it’s likely a spot of light that’s been smeared into a streak by a long integration time. And it might not even be 3I/Atlas; since the comet would have been near Phobos at the time, it could be a smeared-out picture of the Martian moon.
Part of the reason for all this confusion about a simple photograph is the continuing U.S. government shutdown, which has furloughed a lot of the NASA and JPL employees. And not only has the shutdown made it hard to get the straight poop on 3I/Atlas, it’s also responsible for the confusion over the state of the Juno mission. The probe, which has been studying the Jovian system since 2016, was supposed to continue through September 30, 2025; unfortunately, the shutdown started at one minute past midnight the very next day. With no news out of NASA, it’s unclear whether Juno is still in operation, or whether it’s planned intentional deorbit into Jupiter, to prevent contaminating any of the planet’s potentially life-bearing moons, already occurred. That makes it a bit of a Schrödinger’s space probe until NASA can tell us what’s going on.
And finally, are we really recommending that you watch a 25-minute video from a channel that specializes in linguistics? Yep, we sure are, because we found Rob Words’ deep dive into the NATO phonetic alphabet really interesting. For those of you not used to listening to the ham bands or public service radio, phonetic alphabets help disambiguate spoken letters from each other. Over a noisy channel, “cee” and “dee” are easily confused, but “Charlie” and “Delta” are easier to distinguish. But as Rob points out, getting to the finished NATO alphabet — spoiler alert, it’s neither NATO nor phonetic — was anything but a smooth road, with plenty of whiskey-tango-foxtrot moments along the way. Enjoy!
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The second Global Tipping Points Report warns that the world has crossed a key threshold as ocean heat devastates warm-water reefs.#TheAbstract
Earth’s Climate Has Passed Its First Irreversible Tipping Point and Entered a ‘New Reality’
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November.
Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.
“We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point,” said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. “But on the plus side,” he added, “we've also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system,” referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.
The world is entering a “new reality” as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5°C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth’s climate system.
Warm-water corals are rich ecosystems that support a quarter of all marine life and provide food and income to more than a billion people. These vital reefs have experienced “diebacks” for years as rising marine temperatures produce mass-mortality bleaching events. But the severe marine heat waves of 2023 were particularly devastating, and the corals are now reaching their thermal threshold. The report concludes that they are virtually certain to tip toward widespread diebacks, though preventive actions can mitigate the extent of loss and secure small refuges.
“The marine heat wave hit 80 percent of the world's warm-water coral reefs with the worst bleaching event on record,” said Smith. “Their response confirms that we can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk. The widespread dieback of warm-water coral reefs is already underway, and it's impacting hundreds of millions of people who depend on the reef for fishing, for tourism, for coastal protection, and from rising seas and storm surges.”
The report singled out Caribbean corals as a useful case study given that these ecosystems face a host of pressures, including extreme weather, overfishing, and inadequate sewage and pollution management. These coral diebacks are a disaster not only for the biodiverse inhabitants of the reefs, but also for the many communities who depend on them for food, income, coastal protection, and as a part of cultural identity.
“The Caribbean is in a particularly precarious situation,” Melanie McField, founder and director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative at the Smithsonian Institute, told 404 Media during the briefing. "We are very concerned about the Caribbean, but it's actually all of these warm-water reefs. They're all facing the same thing.”
McField added that the actions needed to bolster the corals’ defense against rising temperatures are clear, and include better sewage treatment, the creation of marine preserves, and more strident efforts to tackle overfishing.
“We've been saying the same things,” she said. “We haven't done them. Those are things that are completely in the power of national and local regulators.”
To that end, the report emphasizes that new governmental frameworks and institutions will need to be formed to tackle these problems, because the current system is clearly not up to the task. Avoiding future tipping points will not only require a doubling-down on decarbonization, but also demands major progress toward carbon removal technologies.
“We need to rapidly scale and take seriously the need for sustainable and equitable carbon removal technologies,” said Manjana Milkoreit, a postdoctoral researcher of sociology and human geography at the University of Oslo. “Carbon removal is now the only way to bring global temperatures back down after overshoot—to achieve net negative, not just net zero emissions. That requires serious and sustained investment, starting now.”
“We are currently not preparing for the distinct impacts of tipping points, and we do not have the capacities to address the cascading effects of tipping points,” she concluded. “The key message here is: Do not assume that we already know what to do, or we're already doing everything we can. It's not just more of the same. A different approach to governance is needed.”
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Resources - Global Tipping Points
Tipping Points Briefing Papers Download the Tipping Points Policy Brief here. Download A positive tipping cascade in power, transport and heating Download the study here.Global Tipping Points
