That little plastic tool you see above could make the dentist’s drill a thing of the past. No more drilling into your teeth, causing pain and making you nervous. The DMG Icon delivers a small amount of hydrochloric acid directly on the cavity and burns away just the right amount of enamel to reach the area where the cavity is eating away at your tooth.

Once that’s done, the dentist uses a separate applicator to inject quick-hardening resin-type goo into the hole, and then with a short zap of high-energy blue light, it hardens so well that your tooth is as good as new. Sounds too good to be true, but if it really works that well it could make dental visits happier.

We all know that kids hate brushing their teeth. That’s why since the dawn of time, so many of them end up as toothless seniors. Now there’s a new way to trick them into brushing. Researchers at the National Taiwan University have come up with something which turns brushing your teeth into a webcam-tracked video game.

With an LED toothbrush, a camera mounted above a mirror, and an LCD display, kids can watch plaque and debris get fragged in a cartoon mouth while they scrub. The system tracks three-demensional movement of the child’s hand, covering 24 separate areas of the mouth. Kids who tested the system ended up brushing twice as well as those who hadn’t used it. Check out the video below.