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Brush Your Teeth Before Breakfast (or 30 Minutes Afterward) for Stronger, Healthier Teeth Brush Your Teeth Before Breakfast (or 30 Minutes Afterward) for Stronger, Healthier Teeth Common sense would tell you that brushing your teeth  after  eating breakfast is good, because you clean off all the gunk from your meal, right? Sometimes, though the opposite is true: You're better off brushing beforehand, or waiting 30 minutes after you eat. Here's why. This week's tip isn't a tip from a reader, but more a tip inspired by readers. Yesterday, we shared  why toothpaste makes everything taste bad , and noted in passing that some dentists recommend brushing before breakfast. Many of you were shocked to hear this, so we decided to dig up some more detailed information and put it in its own post for all to see. The Mayo Clinic notes  that brushing your teeth after you eat is good for all the reasons you'd think: you clean out the bacteria from the food you just ate. If you...

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Is This Star Older Than the Universe? Is This Star Older Than the Universe? The oldest known star appears to be older than the universe itself, but a new study is helping to clear up this seeming paradox. Previous research had estimated that the Milky Way galaxy's so-called "Methuselah star" is up to 16 billion years old. That's a problem, since most researchers agree that the  Big Bang  that created the universe occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. Now a team of astronomers has derived a new, less nonsensical age for the Methuselah star, incorporating information about its distance, brightness, composition and structure. "Put all of those ingredients together, and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a residual uncertainty that makes the star's age compatible with the age of the universe," study lead author Howard Bond, of Pennsylvania State University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement. The uncertain...

Meghan Daum: Online commenters and 'the nasty effect' - latimes.com Meghan Daum: Online commenters and 'the nasty effect' - latimes.com Finally! Scientific research backs up my perennial gripe about the soul-killing, society-destroying effects of online comments. A study published last month on the website of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (which does not allow comments) shows that comments can actually sway the perceptions and opinions of otherwise objective readers. Researchers from George Mason University and the  University of Wisconsin-Madison  set up a fake blog with a news item on a new (and also fake) technological product called nanosilver that had several benefits and several risks. They then created two versions of the news post, one with comments that ran the gamut from supportive to skeptical but were civil, and one where the comments ran the same gamut but contained rude outbursts, obscenities and attacks on other commenters. Then they...