What if damaged teeth could heal themselves without the need of a root canal? Apparently, that’s what Harvard and the University of Nottingham are trying to figure out. They believe they can create stem cell stimulated fillings.

Worldwide, dentists treat hundreds of millions of cavities each year by drilling out the decayed part of the tooth and replacing it with a filling. According to Popular Science, the problem is up to 15 percent of those procedures will fail, which will lead to a root canal to remove the tooth’s pulp, a soft tissue in the center of the tooth that contains blood vessels, nerves, and connective tissue. The downside is, following a root canal, the tooth’s strength is weaker and could eventually need to be removed.

Adam Celiz is a therapeutic biomaterials researcher who believes that stem cells could help reduce the number of root canals and the need for dentures. Celiz and his team developed a new kind of filling that is made from stem cells that can help your tooth heal. Just like regular fillings, the biomaterial stem cells are injected into the tooth and hardened with ultra-violet light.

We have talked about the polarization of macrophages in a number of previous articles, but, in short, macrophages can have multiple behavioral profiles that determine what roles they play; this is known as polarization. A new study has identified a regulatory protein that controls this process.

Macrophage Polarization

For the purposes of this article, we are interested in the M1 and M2 polarization. The M1 type is pro-inflammatory and aggressive towards invading pathogens, while the M2 type of macrophage is anti-inflammatory in nature, suppressing inflammatory responses and facilitating tissue repair.

Spinach leaf veins can be used in place of human blood vessels.

Reading human DNA used to take laboratories, a pile of cash and a long time.

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) — Chinese scientists have cloned monkeys using the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep two decades ago, breaking a technical barrier that could open the door to copying humans.

Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, two identical long-tailed macaques, were born eight and six weeks ago, making them the first primates — the order of mammals that includes monkeys, apes and humans — to be cloned from a non-embryonic cell.

The ocean is crowded. As many as 10 million viruses can be found squirming in a single millilitre of its water, and it turns out they have friends we never even knew about.

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown family of viruses that dominate the ocean and can’t be detected by standard lab tests. Researchers suspect this viral multitude may already exist outside the water — maybe even inside us.

“We don’t think it’s ocean-specific at all,” says environmental microbiologist Martin Polz from MIT.