Stem cell fillings could regrow teeth, not just patch them

By Kelly Hodgkins Published July 8, 2016

There is nothing worse than having to deal with cavities and the inevitable tooth pain that comes with dental disease. And as if the discomfort in your mouth wasn’t bad enough, you also have to deal with the resulting pain in your pocketbook when you are forced to cough up big bucks for a root canal. This kind of expensive and unpleasant treatment may eventually become a thing of the past thanks to the award-winning work of a team of scientists from the University of Nottingham and Harvard University, who have developed a method of regrowing damaged teeth.

The groundbreaking dental treatment uses a filling-like material seeded with stem cells to promote properties that encourage the growth of inner tooth pulp and dentin, structural components of a tooth. This new synthetic biomaterial is handled like a traditional filling and used to fill an open cavity in a tooth, but with one significant difference from existing treatments — drilling is kept to a minimum.

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Existing dental fillings are not compatible with the pulp inside the tooth and require extensive drilling to remove rather than repair the damaged parts of the tooth. Once the damaged part of a tooth is removed, it is capped to prevent further harm.

In stark contrast to current dental practices, the new bio-friendly filling material was designed to repair the tooth and can be placed in direct contact with the pulp that is exposed when a cavity is formed. Once in place, the biomaterial stimulates the existing stem-cell population, kicking off a natural process of repair that results in the regeneration of damaged pulp tissue and dentin. In this method, damaged teeth are regrown and not removed.

This innovative regenerative process was presented during the recent Emerging Technologies Competition 2016 and was awarded the second prize in the materials division by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Going forward, the team hopes to work with industry partners to bring the method out of the laboratory and into dentists’ offices around the world. “We are excited about the promise of therapeutic biomaterials for bringing regenerative medicine to restorative dentistry,” said research fellow Kyle Vining from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University to Newsweek.

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Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…

Cars

Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles

rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Cars

Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs

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Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Computing

DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models

DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.