Teeth

You have something like 32 teeth in your mouth -- give or take a few wisdom teeth. If you were so inclined, you could brush each tooth with a different paste -- there are enough out there to do so -- thanks to a culture that celebrates individualism and manufacturers happy to be part of that celebration. "If you think about what consumers are used to seeing -- more targeted products -- it would only make sense, then, that the oral-care category and the toothpaste category would follow suit," said Kim Feil, division president for worldwide innovation at Information Resources Inc., a market researcher in Chicago.

With the wave of a meat ax and a smile, a young man in a bloody butcher's apron tries to entice me into buying a skinned sheep carcass. Careful not to offend, I smile and move briskly to the next stall. This is the start of my Saturday morning shopping grocery shop at the Mir Market Bazaar in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. Two years ago, I might have complained about the long lines in American supermarkets or the paralyzing number of choices of cereal. But after two years as a State Department official in the central Asian country of Turkmenistan, bordered on the south by Iran and the west by Afghanistan, I've decided when I return to the United States, I'll stop complaining.

MAJURO, Republic of the Marshall Islands -- Dr. Jack Shannon, the last U.S. Public Health Service dentist in the Marshall Islands, would like to be brightening smiles all over the land.Instead, the wiry, crew-cut former missionary, who heads the only dental practice in this former U.S. Trust Territory, spends most of his time in a cramped hospital clinic here pulling rotten teeth."I've seen 6-year-olds with 18 decayed teeth," he says. "The most [teeth] they can have is 24."An increasingly Western diet heavy with highly refined food and sugar arrived with the Americans after World War II, and now it is turning Marshallese teeth to mush.

Prison could not quell William Addis' industrious spirit. One day, the 18th-century Englishman swiped a bone from his jail's soup pot. Over the next days, he whittled it into a handle. Then, he bribed a guard to bring him bristles and glue. He used those ingredients to fashion a toothbrush. Addis' ingenuity spawned a toothbrush dynasty that would see his descendants become England's leading dental health suppliers. During World War II, they slipped miniature maps of Germany into the hollow shafts of brushes produced for the army, so if captured, soldiers might have help escaping.

Until the yellow school buses started pulling up at the National Museum of Dentistry's door, visitors to the $5 million gallery were as scarce as crooked teeth in a beauty pageant.The exhibit hall on the edge of the University of Maryland's downtown campus, which opened in June, still has a tough time attracting large numbers of casual, walk-in patrons such as those who visit the Babe Ruth and B&O Railroad museums, two neighboring institutions on the western side of downtown Baltimore.The dental museum has adopted a different strategy.

DRINKING diet soda might help your waistline, but it won't do any favors for your teeth. Although mineral-rich enamel is the hardest surface in the human body, it's not a match for the old-fashioned American soft drink - including the sugar-free kind. In a study to be published next month, researchers found that the regular and diet versions of popular drinks such as Pepsi and Coke caused the same amount of dental erosion. "I was always convinced that there was going to be a difference in the way diet drinks and regular drinks affect teeth," said J. Anthony von Fraunhofer, professor of biomaterials science at the University of Maryland Dental School and lead author of the study.

It's an unlucky day, even for Vladimir Bakk.The 49-year-old Moscow-born pianist has just finished a three-day marathon in the dentist's chair to replace teeth he lost almost 20 years ago when KGB goons beat him up, breaking his nose and his jaw. He returns home to discover that approximately $8,000 worth of concerts scheduled in Buenos Aires may have to be canceled because of an Argentine concert manager's negligence. That means Bakk should not have paid the dentist $2,400 of the $3,000 that one of his admirers, a world-famous pianist living in Switzerland, had sent to help pay his living expenses.

WASHINGTON - A replica of 40-foot crocodile longer than a bus, with bone-crushing teeth and what its discoverer calls an "ambush lifestyle," took up residence recently at the National Geographic Society's Explorers Hall. Fortunately, the Sarcosuchus imperator - nicknamed SuperCroc - has been dead for 110 million years. Its bones, recovered from a desert in central Niger in Africa by a team led by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, are forbidding enough. Sereno, an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic, and Brady Barr, a reptile expert, supplemented the real bones with plaster ones to create the complete SuperCroc skeleton model that went on display at the society.

In the past five years, 132 new teeth-whitening devices have been introduced, including strips, toothpaste and gum. Over the same period, the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry reports that customer requests for dentists to perform teeth whitening procedures have risen more than 300 percent.

And to think that Shawn Hatosy was thinking of getting his teeth bonded.Hatosy, the Silver Spring-born star of "Outside Providence," which opens Sept. 1, was auditioning for the role of Timothy "Dunph" Dunphy two years ago when the movie's director, Michael Corrente, asked him to open wide."Michael was like, `Show me your teeth,' " Hatosy recalled the other day during a telephone interview. "And I showed him, and he kind of had this look like, `Eeeuww!' He was like, `Yeah, they're pretty bad, but not for Dunphy.