Flynn Confessed Liar. Irish Brexit Veto. Cutlery and the Modern Overbite.

Both the US and UK news is going into overdrive with the newest development of the Russia-White House investigation. Former General and National Security Advisor of the United States for 27 days, Michael Flynn has admitted publicly that he lied to the FBI and did hold talks with the Russian ambassador during the electon campaign. There are as yet unverified reports that he was directed to do so by Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. The Flynn announcement even made the Fox news, normally very supportive of President Trump.

There is of course a lot of hot air being spent on whether this will lead to President Trump's loss of office. I'm not so sure until there is more evidence. The president still has a fall-back position of having been misinterpreted by staff who then acted on their own.

Just a couple of days to go before Theresa May meets Jean Claude Juncker with an offer that will allow Brexit negotiations to progress to the next stage.  Pressure on the remaining Irish border question intensified today. Donald Tusk visited Ireland and gave a joint press announcement with the Irish Prime Minister. Tusk reiterated that Ireland could halt Brexit negotiation progress if dissatisfied with the UK offer/solutions to avoid a hard border, with the full support of the EU.

My second visit to the dentist within a week, this time for minor fillings on two front teeth, on in the top and one in the lower jaw. The option was to try without anaesthetic, as the injections themselves would be very uncomfortable, and fortunately this turned out well.

Part of the work after the fillings was to fine-tune the bite of the two opposing teeth. I have an overbite, in line with a significant proportion of modern day humans in the developed world. Overbite is where the top front teeth bite over the lower ones, rather than the tips of the teeth meeting. this is apparently a relatively recent phenomenon in the human population, with the incidence having increased over the past 250 years. Skulls of earlier humans show that the majority had teeth meeting on top of each other, and also showed considerable wear on the biding surfaces.

The American anthropologist, C. Loring Brace, proposed that this is actually due to the invention of cutlery. Rather than having to bite off pieces of hard/tough food, which promotes the front teeth cutting on each other, we now cut our cooked food into smaller pieces with knives and forks, negating the need for the sharp cutting tooth action and allowing an overbite for chewing with the back teeth. This is not a genetic change but a consequence of changing eating behaviour.