Making Teeth

 Most of us have a filling or two...or more. Human teeth are amazing, but have their limits.

Because of this, scientists have been trying to duplicate tooth enamel for, oh, a while. The composites we now use to fill teeth are better than when we used toxic mercury, but they're still weaker than the natural enamel. This is why sometimes your dentist has to repair or replace a filling.

They've now succeeded. Sadly, the artificial enamel won't be appearing in your dentists' office any time soon. While it's better than natural enamel, it has to be heated to 300 degrees centigrade, then frozen, then shaped with a diamond saw. It's possible it may be usable for implants if the dentist can send images to a specialist lab.

But it might be useful for protecting chips in laptops and phones...and they're even talking about tooth buildings, as the artificial enamel might be particularly resistant to earthquake damage.

Plus, the fact that enamel is so hard to duplicate just reminds us that biology is cool.