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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 08 2022, @06:32AM
He's both right and wrong. Your saliva does remineralize your teeth when you're healthy enough, but that remineralization isn't fast enough to heal large amounts of damage. It'll only keep 'natural levels' of damage at bay so if you're consuming lots of acidic things, lots of cabs, hard things like seeds, etc... your enamel will get worse despite the remineralization. Think of it like sanding something with 800 grit sandpaper. You'll never smooth out a scratch but the scratch itself will be damn smooth.
Yellowing teeth isn't a sign of aging, it's a sign of food staining your teeth. It shows up in older people more because it takes awhile for it to build up to notable levels, but teeth left to themselves don't turn yellow. The dentin showing though thin enamel isn't the yellowing everyone thinks of when they think of yellow teeth. My enamel is almost gone because I used to eat a lot of lemons and citric acid based candy (Cry Babies). My teeth are more white than yellow and I've never used whiteners. Whiteners come in two main categories: abrasives or stains. Abrasives wear away the stained enamel and stains stain the enamel white. If the yellowing was due to the underlying dentin showing through, neither type would work.
The enamel itself doesn't grow back. What happens is your saliva slowly deposits more minerals to build up the outer layer. Technically that isn't the enamel growing. If you don't have the proper nutrients available or your mouth PH is off then this won't happen effectively. If you're constantly eating then your mouth PH will always be too far off.