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Graphene Shows Promise For Super Strong Dental Fillings (elsevier.com)
Zothecula writes: A team of researchers from four institutions located in Romania and St. Kitts have worked together to determine whether graphene could be used to create more durable dental materials. They worked to test how toxic (abstract) different forms of the material were to teeth, with promising results. "Typical metal fillings can corrode and composite fillings are not very strong; Graphene, on the other hand, is 200 times stronger than steel and doesn't corrode, making it a prime new candidate for dental fillings."
Vamps and Goths will love these.
Once graphene had dreams of being the next wonder material. "Better transistors! Stronger than steel!" they sang. But now... Dental fillings.
Not so much, until "they" start making consistent batches it on an industrial scale.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You want dental filling strength to *match* the strength of the tooth around it, not be stronger, otherwise after a few years the fillings will stick out.
Then your teeth just erode around the fillings. Can I just get a set of permanently-affixed graphene replacement teeth? Then I could bite through cable car cables like that one Bond villain!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I demand that every single graphene molecule be set aside for the Glorious Space Elevator for the Species! Because SPACE!
Typical metal fillings can corrode and composite fillings are not very strong.
For what it's worth, I have three (conservative) amalgam filling in my upper molars that were put in when I was 17. I'm now 52 and my dentist says they're still fine. Though, I'm told that have really good "home care"... From what I've heard, composite fillings should only really be installed on non-chewing surfaces when appearance matters, so strength shouldn't really be an issue.
But I guess 200 times stronger and longer lasting would be better, especially if they solve that pesky aging / dying problem.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Great, every rapper will be a Bond villain now.
It's been showing Promise for lots of things for a long time now. Is is actually USED for anything yet?
Sheesh, it's becoming just like Fusion.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The strength of dental restorative materials has nothing to do with the life of a dental restoration. Restorative materials should mimic the properties of those portions of the teeth they replace after decay is removed. Check the physical strength of the different parts of tooth anatomy (dentin and enamel vis-a-vis Moh's Scale Of Hardness) against the restorative materials that are available. Then, check the bonded interfaces that can be attained via Biomimetic Dentistry. Match bonding tolerances against bacteria being able to invade BENEATH the restoration and you'll see Biomimetic restorations preserve tooth vitality (the life of the pulp) and respect healthy tooth structure.
It's not about the strength of the material. It's about the preservation of healthy tooth structure. Look at TheFABD.com/pages/for_patients.php and TheFABD.com/pages/FAQ_Patients.php
I have a composite filling that is 27 years old and never had issues with it. I chew ice and haven't been particularly careful.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I really thought by 2015 dentistry would have moved beyond spackling up holes in teeth or pulling them out and replacing them with fake ones. This is still basically 18th-century medical science.
Let me know when they can repair teeth with real dentin and enamel, or grow new ones.
So exactly how bad are your teeth that the need industrial quantities?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Yeah, this reminds me of those fillings made out of asbestos.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/February/graphene-inhaled-lungs.asp
That does not last a life time. As these are temp fixes but not sold as such.
Nearly every tooth they fill now will be pulled sooner or later because of it.
This is theft by deception.
As research has shown that graphene is dangerous to living organic creatures this is a pie in the pie hole.
This way you don't chip your teeth on our new overlord's apparatus.
Let's get something absolutely clear about this comment of "stronger than steel". Graphene is 200X stronger than steel at the atomic level. However, graphene loses it's special properties when you start layering it; it becomes graphite. So while at the atomic level it may be that strong, for a practical purpose it is still an extremely flimsy material.
Hope you don't need something done like a root canal on a tooth with a filling. Drilling through that stuff is probably going to be pretty tough.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
The poster just got a little creepier to me...
I had a bunch of amalgam fillings replaced with porcelain fillings many years ago. These things look great, perform better than the originals and amalgam and aren't subject to decay. My dentist has a Cerec machine (Siemens) that takes a 3-D picture of the tooth and he designs a cap, pushes a button and a device grinds out the cap and he then glues it in - one visit service. He's had this system since the 1990s. The only downside is that they cost $400 to $600 a pop. A lot more for crowns. He does composite fillings as well for simpler fillings. He stopped doing amalgam fillings long ago though these are the cheapest approach. Graphene supposedly nasty for the lungs so I'd hope that any production process would not release this stuff into the air. Head supposedly uses Graphene in its tennis racquets though I suspect that it's a tiny amount of the stuff.
Sorry but I'm not putting any "nano" crystal type anything in my mouth. Coal dust, carbon fiber, fiberglass, silica, asbestos... Hello? Have we learned nothing?
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Developping the biotechnology to simply regrow teeth should be the ultimate goal in this field.
Strength isn't necessarily an advantage in dental fillings. You don't want to abrade the natural opposing surfaces. We already have the ideal dental material - gold. It's nonabrasive, nontoxic, nonreactive, antibacterial, and has a thermal expansion coefficient that matches natural enamel perfectly so that eating cold/hot foods doesn't damage the restoration. This is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
If the tooth is substantially stronger than the jaw it is embedded in (or the peg of tooth is is cemented to) you won't have to worry about a broken tooth. You'll have a different, and probably worse, problem.
I'm pretty sure the same general concern applies to adhesives that are much stronger than what they glue together, and to thread that's much stronger than the pieces of cloth it sews together.
Easy enough to solve. Just replace the peg of tooth with graphene. And the tooth's root with graphene. And the jaw with graphene. And ...
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I have some imalgams from 1974. Still working, no signs of a problem today. They may last longer than the rest of me.
With all the anti-vaccination and anti-dental amalgams people out there, I'm sure that the kooks will also find issue with graphene based fillings.
What a pile of crap slashdot has turned into.