Your dentist visits could become a pleasant pain-free experience, and it’s all thanks to squids . A team of engineers from the University of California San Diego have developed an imaging method using squid ink and ultrasound to check for gum disease. If you’ve ever had to get your mouth checked for gum issues, you know what I’m talking about: the current method to assess gum health involves inserting a periodontal probe’s metal hook in between your gums and teeth. Sometimes, depending on the dentist’s technique your pain tolerance, it hurts. The team’s method eliminates the need for probing — you simply need to gargle some food-grade squid ink mixed with water and cornstarch. Squid ink is rich in melanin nanoparticles, and those get trapped in the pockets between your teeth and gums. When a dentist shines a laser onto your mouth, the nanoparticles swell and create pressure differences in the gum pockets. That’s where the ultrasound part of the imaging method comes in. Ultrasound can detect those pockets, so dentists can create a full map of your mouth, like this: [Image credit: Jokerst Bioimaging Lab at UC San Diego. Ultrasound image of the teeth is in black and white. The photoacoustic signal from the squid ink contrast agent in the pocket depth is in red and signals from stains on the teeth are in blue. ] The result shows how deep those pockets are, which indicate gum health. That’s why dentists stick a probe in those pockets to begin with — if they’re only one to two millimeters in depth, it means your gums are healthy. Anything deeper than that is a sign of gum disease, and the deeper those pockets are, the worse the issue is. Problem is, the results of periodontal probing depend on the amount of pressure a dentist uses and the area he’s probing. He could be probing the wrong location or putting too little or too much pressure. Jesse Jokerst, the study’s senior author likened the periodontal probe to “examining a dark room with just a flashlight” wherein “you can only see one area at a time.” He said that their method is more like “flipping on all the light switches so you can see the entire room all at once, ” leading to more accurate findings. The engineers have big plans for their creation, starting with replacing the lasers in the method with more affordable LED lights. Their ultimate goal, however, is to create a mouthpiece that can instantly assess your gum health. They also want to get rid of the the squid ink concoction’s salty and bitter taste, though I’ll take than any day over painful probing. Source: UC San Diego
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Squid ink could make your dentist visits much less painful
Saint Catherine’s Monastery, a sacred Christian site nestled in the shadow of Mount Sinai, is home to one of the world’s oldest continuously used libraries. Thousands of manuscripts and books are kept there — some of which contain hidden treasures. An anonymous reader shares a report: Now, a team of researchers is using new technology to uncover texts that were erased and written over by the monks who lived and worked at the monastery. Many of these original texts were written in languages well known to researchers — Latin, Greek, Arabic — but others were inscribed in long-lost languages that are rarely seen in the historical record. Manuscripts with multiple layers of writing are known as palimpsests, and there are about 130 of them at St. Catherine’s Monastery, according to the website of the Early Manuscript Electronic Library, which has been leading the initiative to uncover the original texts. With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear, and Saint Catherine’s found itself in relative isolation. Monks turned to reusing older parchments when supplies at the monastery ran scarce. To uncover the palimpsests’ secret texts, researchers photographed thousands of pages multiple times, illuminating each page with different-colored lights. They also photographed the pages with light shining onto them from behind, or from an oblique angle, which helped “highlight tiny bumps and depressions in the surface, ” Gray writes. They then fed the information into a computer algorithm, which is able to distinguish the more recent texts from the originals. Read more of this story at Slashdot.