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from the articles-to-sink-your-teeth-into dept.
New artificial enamel is harder and more durable than the real thing
Enamel enables teeth to take a stomping and keep on chomping. The hardest tissue in the human body is tough enough to resist dents, yet elastic enough not to crack during decades of jaw smashing. It's so incredible that scientists haven't created a substitute that can match it—until now. Researchers say they have designed an artificial enamel that's even tougher and more durable than the real thing.
"This is a clear leap forward," says Alvaro Mata, a biomedical engineer at the University of Nottingham who was not involved with the study. The advance, he says, could have uses beyond repairing teeth. "From creating body armor to strengthening or hardening surfaces for floors or cars, there could be many, many applications."
[...] In the new study, scientists tried to mimic nature's enamel assembly. Instead of peptides and other biological tools, they used extreme temperatures to coax the wires into an orderly formation. As with earlier construction of artificial enamels, the team built its new material from wires of hydroxyapatite—the same mineral that makes up real enamel. But unlike in most other synthetic enamels, the researchers encased the wires in a malleable metal-based coating.
This coating on the crystalline wires is the secret ingredient that makes this artificial enamel so resilient, says study co-author Nicholas Kotov, a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The coating makes the wires less likely to snap, because the soft material around them can absorb any powerful pressure or shock. Although the wires in natural enamel feature a magnesium-rich coating, the researchers upgraded to zirconium oxide, which is extremely strong and still nontoxic, Kotov says. The result was a chunk of enamellike material that could be cut into shapes with a diamond-bladed saw.
Also at Scientific American.
Journal Reference:
Hewei Zhao, et. al.,Multiscale engineered artificial tooth enamel, Science (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj3343)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 08 2022, @02:02AM (1 child)
Aside from finally being able to make teeth tough enough to bite other teeth, I'd be surprised if anybody bothers to put this in people's mouths. For one thing, it's going to take a lot of work to prove that it's safe to be put into people's mouths and for another harder teeth aren't necessarily better for the mouth, the rest of the tissues assume that the teeth are only a certain hardness, having harder teeth could lead to unforeseen consequences like extra strain on the rest of the mouth as tougher foods are eaten.
That being said, this won't result in the need for full tooth replacements, so it's probably going to find applications outside of the mouth if they can make this reliabley.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday February 08 2022, @02:07PM
Thing is, you don't want to have something that's tough enough to bite other teeth, because anything tough enough to do that will also shatter other teeth. The reason why most dentists will install gold crowns rather than ceramic/porcelain crowns, or stuff like lithium disilicate or zirconia (which, incidentally, are also as hard as this new artificial enamel) is that gold is soft enough that it won't damage the other teeth it grinds/impacts against. In the case of wear or damage you want the crown to lose, not the other tooth.