Grow Your Own Teeth.

Wired opens wide and spits out a story on a dental breakthrough. If you happen to have lost any of your teeth (ahem), you don’t have to get crowns or dentures any more. Now, you can grow your own replacements… sort of:

“What we’re hoping to have happen is to catch [decaying teeth] early and remineralize them,” said Sally Marshall, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco. Marshall gave a talk last week at the spring meeting of the Materials Research Society on rebuilding the inner portions of teeth.

While regrowing your uncle’s toothless grin from scratch is still a decade away, the ability to use some of the body’s own building materials for oral repair would be a boon to dentists, who have been fixing cavities with metal fillings since the 1840s. Enamel and dentin are remarkably strong and long-lasting, and they can repair themselves. But as scientists are continuing to find out, dentin in particular is a remarkably complex structure.