Your mouth is FILTHY !! Really !  Your mouth is full of germs, which is why you are supposed to brush your teeth well. As you get older, and particularly if you don’t keep your teeth clean, bacteria (germs!) get down under your gums and make them red and swollen.  That may even make your teeth fall out !

Good oral hygiene (that’s a fancy word for brushing your teeth well) can help. And dentists can use antibiotics (like penicillin) to kill the germs if they get bad.  But sometimes those germs become resistant to antibiotics. Then what are you supposed to do !!

Well, maybe nanotechnology can come to the rescue, in particular, a material called graphene oxide. Graphene  (graf-ene) is one of the new wonder materials of nanotechnology. Graphene is a form of carbon; in graphene , the carbon atoms are bonded in a large sheet that is only ONE ATOM THINK.   On a microscopic scale, graphene would look like “chicken wire” with a carbon atom at every junction. The fact that it is only one atom thick gives graphene some very interesting properties. When these single atomic sheets react with oxygen, you can get Graphene Oxide, which also has some pretty cool properties. For one, it dissolves in water!

Scientist have recently determined that graphene oxide can kill some of the stubborn bacteria in your mouth!!  Scientists are still studying whether this is practical in the real world, but maybe, someday, you will have a nanotechnolgy mouthwash containing graphene oxide nanoparticles !!