Day 22 of 100: Some pretty cool pictures

Today’s experiment: Finish getting micro CT scans for human teeth

Result:

Part 1:

The random-looking white lines across the image means that this tooth is too dense for our little low-powered lab x-ray machine. Basically, we need to send the tooth away to get images from someone else with a stronger x-ray machine. The image should look more like the bottom slice of part 2:

,

…where you can clearly see two layers: a thick, outer white layer, and a darker layer in the middle.

Anyway the program I’m using to get the images in part 2 is pretty sweet. I can mess with the colors of the images so that the more dense parts of the tooth would be marked in red, while the less dense parts are marked in blue.

So here you are, more evidence that the outer layer of enamel is very dense, in the case of Part 1, so dense that our machine quite simply cannot. The teeth that we’re able to view with our machine are primary teeth (as the dentists say) or baby teeth. Thank God we lose these, they’re not as solid as permanent teeth. We need those to stick around for a little while longer.