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This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewerVictoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
During last week's Apple Watch announcement, I let out a distinct "Noooo!" in the Steve Jobs Theater. Along with a new readiness metric and a redesigned Health app, Apple had just announced that later this year, it'd be introducing a new longevity feature called Health Age.
This is a familiar concept in the wearable and health tech world. The idea is that if you put effort into your health and fitness, your physiological age c …
Instagram creator All Gear No Skill has used Dyson's CameraJet toothbrush to shoot street photos
The $499.99 / £419.99 / AU$799 brush uses a 100k-pixel (0.1MP) camera to find the gaps between your teeth
Shots were grabbed by screenshotting the live feed in the MyDyson app
You may have heard the phrase "the best camera is the one you have with you", but what if that's a toothbrush? Instagram creator All Gear No Skill (@allthegearnoskill) has taken Dyson's new CameraJet out of the bathroom and onto the streets, using its tiny built-in camera to capture a series of gloriously odd street photos.
Launched at the start of September, the CameraJet is Dyson's first foray into oral care, and it costs a jaw-clenching $499.99 / £419.99 / AU$799. Tucked just below the brush head is a 100k-pixel macro camera that feeds a machine learning system Dyson calls Gap Optical Targeting. It analyzes at 28fps to spot the gaps between your teeth, then fires a cone-shaped jet of mouth rinse at each one, so you're effectively flossing while you brush.
The same camera doubles as a dental endoscope, streaming a live view of your molars to the MyDyson app (which, as TechRadar writer Emily Peck found in her Dyson CameraJet review, can be a little more revealing than you might like).
Point, shoot, rinse, repeat
That live view is the key to "taking photos" with the toothbrush. Dyson says the CameraJet doesn't save images on the brush or in the cloud, and there's no capture button in the app, so the process is refreshingly low-tech. You point the brush head at your subject, watch the feed on your phone, and take a screenshot when the composition looks right. It's like a $500 / AU$800 remote viewfinder with bristles.
As you'd expect from a sensor designed to peer at incisors from a few millimeters away, the results won't have anyone trading in their Leica: the macro lens bends everything into a fisheye-style bubble, 100k pixels works out to a mere 0.1MP resolution, and the colors and white balance wander all over the place, lending the shots a strange, almost infrared look. For me, the photos instantly brought to mind the otherworldly, hallucinatory AI-driven image generation from a few years ago: think Will Smith eating spaghetti.
The CameraJet surely won't be the last unlikely gadget to get this treatment, either, because cameras are turning up in all sorts of devices that have nothing to do with photography. Your car may have several for parking and driver assistance, robot vacuums use them to dodge kids' toys and charging cables, and some smart fridges and ovens will let you peek at what's inside via your phone. Not to mention robot lawn mowers and VR headsets.
Plenty of these offer a live feed in a companion app, so there's a house full of accidental point-and-shoots out there waiting for someone with a sense of humor. Personally, I can't wait for the first portrait series shot entirely on a fridge.
The Corps of Discovery Expedition set out in 1804, directed by President Thomas Jefferson to survey the United States’ newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. The exploration forms a core piece of early U.S. history. Picture a scene from the journey: It’s a cool morning, the silence punctuated by birdsong and the rustle of the breeze through the cottonwood trees. To one side, Commander William Clark, his rifle leaning against a plum tree and his rucksack nearby, squats over a latrine pit, unceremoniously heeding the call of nature.
The Louisiana Purchase constituted a territory of around 828,000 square miles, which the U.S. had bought from France in 1803. This was, it is worth noting, largely without the consent of the Indigenous groups who had lived there for millennia. The purpose of the expedition was threefold: to find a practical trade route westward to the Pacific coast, to explore and document the territory, and to stake a claim to the area before any other European powers butted in. Led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the 40-man team, plus their guide Sacagawea, spent more than two years trekking westward.
Believe it or not, the holes that were used as toilets along the march to the Pacific have been invaluable for archaeologists and historians. This is thanks especially to a type of treatment included in the expedition’s medical kit.
How Lewis and Clark went to the bathroom
Everybody poops—it’s a universal human need. But most accounts of the Corps of Discovery’s journey leave out the details of how the Corps members dealt with bathroom business.
Each of the campsites where the expedition spent time had an accompanying latrine pit, situated well away from camp for sanitary (and privacy) reasons. The latrines would have seen a lot of use, because the Corps of Discovery’s diet wasn’t the best for gut health.
American artist Charles Marion Russell painted this piece entitled “Lewis and Clark on the Lower Columbia” in 1905. Image: Public Domain
While the expedition members relied heavily on foraged and hunted food, they also carried backup rations. These included nearly 14,000 pounds of dry goods, including flour, salt, coffee, dried pork, and lard. All told, each member of the Corps ate around nine pounds of meat per day. All of that protein without lots and lots of fiber added up to frequent constipation. The untreated water they drank from rivers and creeks they encountered probably didn’t help their circumstances. Enter…Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills.
The mercury constipation pills known as “thunderclappers”
In 1803, as preparation for the upcoming expedition, William Clark traveled to Philadelphia for a two-week medical crash course with Dr. Benjamin Rush. Rush was a prominent physician in his day, and a Founding Father of the United States. His signature is one of the 56 on the Declaration of Independence.
Rush taught Clark some basic field skills, such as bone-setting and wound treatment. Clark left Philadelphia with new skills and a well-stocked medical kit that included 50 dozen of Doctor Rush’s Bilious Pills. These were compounded tablets about the size of a raisin, composed of powerful laxative ingredients. The pills were nicknamed “thunderclappers” because of the speed with which they took effect. The main ingredient of the thunderclappers was calomel, or mercury chloride.
Mercury, historically also called quicksilver, has been thought to have curative effects for centuries. It’s a metal that is liquid at room temperature, which seems miraculous in and of itself.
It was also a popular treatment for syphilis. This is not to say it was an effective treatment for syphilis. When it was administered for that disease, slowly in low doses, patients were more likely to die from mercury poisoning than from the STI.
This drug jar for mercury pills was made in Italy sometime between 1731 and 1770, several decades before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out on their historic expedition. Image: Science & Society Picture Library / Contributor / Getty Images Jaron Chubb
When taken in larger doses, though, as in the thunderclapper pills, it prompted a quick evacuation, the body’s way of ejecting poison. The men of the Lewis and Clark expedition used these pills freely as a way to compensate for their high-protein and low-fiber diet. As a result, all the latrine pits they used between the Midwest and the Pacific coast were laced with high concentrations of mercury.
Lewis and Clark pooped mercury. Today archaeologists use it to map their route.
As many an environmentalist will caution, mercury does not decompose when it’s in the ground. It stays put, and is detectable through modern soil testing techniques. The 600-plus latrines dug and used by the Corps of Discovery form a trail of their own, marked by mercury.
The expedition was a government-sanctioned military expedition, so Lewis and Clark both kept copious notes on every aspect of their travels. Historians have tried to pinpoint the locations of these camps based on the expedition journals, with minimal success.
The only campsite that archaeologists have been able to confirm so far is the Traveler’s Rest camp, just outside of Missoula, Montana. This is all thanks to the remains of Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills, which left enough mercury in the ground to differentiate the remains of a latrine pit (or “sink” as they were called in the 1800s) from animal burrows or agricultural ditches.
Archaeology is all about reconstructing the lives of people in the past, and it’s worth remembering that this means all aspects of life. Our own bodily functions remind us that we all share complex and interwoven histories, and that even the most mundane parts of our lives can be important in the future.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
Dyson is known for doing the unexpected, and nothing in the brand's history has been quite as unexpected as its recent toothbrush launch. Well... perhaps the air-purifying headphones were more of a surprise. But still, this shift into oral care certainly wasn't on my 2026 bingo card.
The Dyson CameraJet launched earlier this month. A toothbrush like no other, this chunky device made headlines with its integrated camera and gap-targeting mouthwash squirter. However, the launch has been dogged somewhat by multiple reports of new gadget breaking almost immediately. The toothbrush is also showing as out of stock in multiple territories, including the US, UK and Australia.
Dyson has issued a response, which reads:
"We have had a very positive reaction to the new Dyson CameraJet and are experiencing strong demand globally. We are seeing some shortages of supply as we are in the process of scaling up production.
Additionally, we are aware that a small number of early batches of Dyson CameraJet products may have experienced a component issue. We are isolating those batches and are taking all the necessary steps to support our customers."
Rocky start aside, it's an impressive piece of engineering, and assuming Dyson gets those problems fixed, it has plenty going for it (our tester was impressed enough to award it four stars in our Dyson CameraJet review). I got a demo at the Dyson Unveiled event, where I also had a chance to chat to Jake Dyson — Chief Engineer at the brand, and son of founder James — about the new product's development process. Here are seven interesting things I learned about the new CameraJet...
For avoidance of confusion, I'll use 'Jake' to mean the person, and 'Dyson' when I'm referring to the brand.
1. It took six years to develop
Oral care is a brand new category for Dyson, and getting it market-ready was a lengthy process. That's partly because it needed to, in Jake's words, "work perfectly" before it could be launched. The core feature — a 100k pixel macro lens camera that identifies gaps in your teeth, and delivers a targeted jet of mouthwash directly at them — was particularly tricky to get right.
"We probably could have launched [the CameraJet] two years ago, but it wouldn't have hit every gap perfectly, and that's not acceptable," says Jake. "You know, if you bought it, and it missed the gaps, and didn't do its job, you'd be really disappointed. So, it's got to work properly."
(Image credit: Dyson)
Getting the design just right (in theory, at least...) was a complicated process. "It genuinely took six years to train that camera, because of the variations in people's mouths. It's highly complex," says Jake. "You've got saliva, you've got things moving in front of the camera, you've got dark, shade, light. It's so many things the machine learning has to account for."
He adds: "It's a bit like a driverless car when it snows. If it completely loses its environment, how do you control it?"
2. ...but it's a good job it did
"Six years ago, the camera, the chips that process within the machine, the compute power, probably would have been too expensive," says Jake. Luckily, within that lengthy development process, the cost of all those components dropped enough to make it feasible as a consumer product.
Relatively speaking, of course — it has a list price of $499.99 / £419.99 / AU$799, so its definitely more of an investment than your average toothbrush. Still, Jake is keen to impress that it's very much not your average toothbrush: "What you have there is essentially a $70,000 piece of lab equipment in a handheld consumer product."
3. The colors come from Dyson's beauty lineup
While it's a new product category, it's still very recognizably 'Dyson'. The brand Dyson has pulled its color combinations from its haircare gadget lineup. "The colors have come from our beauty products — so the hair dryers, the Airwraps. Because we think it's a beauty product too," says Jake.
At launch, there are two color combos to choose between. On the 'Ceramic Ultra Blue' version, the toothbrush is an electric blue inspired by Yves Klein — an artist brand founder James Dyson is a fan of. ("He wasn't allowed to use the same blue, but we created our own," reveals Jake.) There's also a 'Ceramic Pink' colorway, with a blush pink toothbrush.
(Image credit: Dyson)
Both have detailing in rose gold, and a heather purple dock. As well as being familiar to anyone who has seen Dyson's recent haircare launches, the colorways benefit from being different to what you'll generally see in the oral care aisle. "Other toothbrushes are white, or black, or a nasty pink," comments Jake. "So it's quite nice to do something different, and… you know you look at it and recognize it as Dyson because of the colors."
4. There are already follow-ups in the works
"If we're going to go into a new area, then we'll do that knowing that we've got more products behind it," says Jake. He confirms that they'll start with a roadmap of multiple products and plan for "expansion in that category, quite quickly".
When pushed on if there's another toothbrush in the works, he responds, "We'd be crazy not to." If I had to make a prediction, I'd bet that — assuming the current component issue is sorted speedily — a second-gen version will be announced and unveiled this time next year, at an IFA-adjacent Unveiled event at the start of September 2027.
5. It's trained on pictures of real mouths
The CameraJet needed to be able to recognize the inside of any mouth. "It's taken two years to train it through imagery and mouths from around the world," says Jake. Said photos came from "images and libraries and probably some dental records too", if you're interested.
While AI was — and continues to be — involved, it's not the same AI you're using when you fire up, say, ChatGPT. "When you go on ChatGPT on your mobile phone, you're using AI live. When you use a toothbrush, you're not," clarifies Jake. "It's in-built machine learning. We used AI to reference all of the images of mouths to train the machine."
The learning will continue as you use the toothbrush, too. "We [continue to] improve it. It trains itself to be even better the more you use it, so it understands your mouth," says Jake.
(Image credit: Dyson)
6. It'll know if you try and use a fake brush head
Dyson is — probably justifiably — concerned about copycats. "We obviously patent areas of the product, if we can patent them, to prevent [dupes]," Jake says. "But we do that in every product, and they always find a way. They find a way, but the product isn't as good."
He continues: "You may well see a toothbrush six months to a year with a camera in it that fires a jet. But does it hit the right bit? The gap between your teeth?"
Dyson is also guarding against third-party brushheads. "There is a chip [in the brushhead]," says Jake. "If there are fake brush heads, it will detect it. In the same way, if you put a fake battery in the vacuum cleaners, and put a fake attachment on our hair dryers, it will detect it."
That's a cost worth factoring in if you're thinking of investing. Replacement heads don't come cheap: a pair will set you back $29.99 / £25 / AU$49.
7. It is suitable for travel… honest
On the suggestion that the Dyson CameraJet might be considered too chunky to travel with, Jake is adamant it's completely fine. "It's definitely to be travelled with. There's a travel case that just slips over."
He also points out that if you're traveling with a tube of toothpaste and a bottle of mouthwash as well as your toothbrush, that's going to take up a fair amount of space. The CameraJet can be filled up with those things before packing. It's a fair point, but I'm still not convinced.
Dyson has included a travel case (right image), but the CameraJet is still chunkier than your average electric toothbrush (Image credit: Dyson)
8. Jake Dyson has personally road-tested it
Wondering if your teeth will work with the CameraJet? Jake says it can deal with all kinds of troublesome teeth... including his own. "I've been cleaning my teeth on a number of devices intermittently for about three months. I have very tight teeth in the back. So raspberry seeds, or Parma ham… They get stuck right there. And [the CameraJet] just blasts it out. It's really good."
In fact, his only real word of warning is the surprise you might get from seeing your molars captured on camera for the first time. "It is quite shocking seeing inside your mouth," he smiles.
The Trump Administration has rolled back a major climate rule, falsely claiming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants do not impact the climate or human health.
The House Judiciary Committee will consider the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act as the Trump administration moves to roll back federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
A federal judge on Tuesday said more than 20 defendants including 3M, DuPont, and Honeywell must face claims by Connecticut firefighters who said their protective gear was contaminated by toxic "forever chemicals" that increased their risk of cancer.
Cape Fear River Watch released a statement, saying the settlement “won’t come close to making us whole again after all the harm DuPont and Chemours have done to the communities of the Cape Fear Region.”
Heat waves, wildfires and floods have cascading economic impacts, causing incomes to decline and the price of basic goods to rise. The trend will escalate as temperatures continue to increase.
Holcim will deploy two batteries from the startup Electrified Thermal Solutions to cut down on fossil fuels, which often supply the intense heat in cement-making.
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