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takyon writes:

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)

Original Submission