When talking about the world's oldest company, I'm gonna have to define what exactly a company is. And I don't mean any of these, though they're all worthy definitions. I'm talking about this. I'm gonna use the Wikipedia definition of the word company, meaning a legal entity made up of an association of people, be they natural, legal, or a mixture of both, for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise. In other words, a business. Realistically, it's pretty much impossible to know who opened up the first business ever. Humans started bartering things as far back as 150,000 BC. In 5000 BC, humans started using metallic objects to represent value, and only in 700 BC did the Lydians start using a standardized coinage. Despite all that, we'll never know who it was who first flipped that open sign and started selling the first food, or jewelry, or pottery, or whatever. It's for this reason that whenever we're talking about the first company ever created, there's no way of knowing. But we do know what the oldest company is. I mean, companies don't last that long though. They go under all the time. Compare your hometown today to how it was 10 years ago and chances are, a lot of the businesses have come and gone. Depressions, recessions, and other economic downturns take a toll on everyone, including large corporations. Another factor to consider is that these days a lot of companies just can't keep up with the changing technology, Radio Shack, Sears, Kmart, Blockbuster. Today, these names have become practically synonymous with bankruptcy. Thanks to the booming industry of e-commerce, the brick and mortar store has become obsolete, replaced with online purchases that have proved to be more cost efficient, time efficient, and all around more convenient than their traditional counterpart. That being said, other companies that have done well in the past are doing just fine today. To put things into perspective, Walmart, founded in 1962, is celebrating their 57th anniversary this year. Nearly 60 years. That's no small feat, but it's in no way the oldest company ever made. Let's go back a little bit more. 70 years before that, Abercrombie & Fitch was founded in 1892 as an outfitter for the upperclassmen outdoors type. The 1800s were a long time ago, but 93 years before that, in 1799, J.P. Morgan Chasenko was founded by John Pierre Pomp Morgan, and would become the sixth largest bank in the world and the first largest in the United States. 197 years before that, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was founded, and it was the first ever company to go public, meaning that it issued bonds and stock to the general public, becoming the first company to ever go on to a stock exchange. Becoming the first public company ever is a huge feat, but it's not quite the first ever. Let's go back 130 years. Between 1472 and 1489, six banks were founded in Italy during the Renaissance. Several of these banks still operate today. Renaissance Italy is generally considered the forefather of modern banking, but still, this far back, it's not the oldest company. So how far back do we have to go? 1300s? 1200s? 900s? You may be surprised, but the oldest company in the world is Gongogumi, a Japanese construction company founded in 578 AD, 1441 years ago. 578 AD was a really long time ago. As a point of reference, around the same time, according to legend, Arthur Pendragon led the Britons to victory over the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Baden. The Romans were waging war with the Persians. The Kingdom of the Franks was founded by King Clovis I, and the Sui dynasty reunites China. The founder, Sige Mitsukongo, was actually a Korean immigrant from Baekje. He was a skilled temple builder who was invited to Japan by Prince Shotoku, son of Emperor Yomei, the 31st Emperor of Japan. Prince Shotoku was famously a Buddhist himself, and helped spread it throughout Japan. At the time, Buddhism was having a massive surge in popularity, starting in India and spreading eastward towards Korea, particularly in Baekje, where Gongo was from, and finally arriving in Japan. Buddhism became so popular in Japan that Buddhist temples were in great demand from the people, temples with which the Japanese architects weren't familiar. And so, Gongo started his business, Gongogumi, which was commissioned to build the first Japanese Buddhist temple, Shtenoji in Osaka. After the death of Sige Mitsukongo, Gongogumi continued, passed down from father to son, or daughter or son-in-law, always staying within the family line and still retaining their master craftsmanship throughout the centuries. As Buddhism continued to grow in Japan, so did the need for Buddhist temples, gates, and other buildings. A thousand years after its founding, in 1583, Gongogumi was once again commissioned to construct the now famous Osaka Castle, which continues to stand proud today. 500 years later during World War II, they stopped their temple construction in order to prepare coffins for the many fallen in the war. Afterward, they had much work to do in the reconstruction of Japan, after years and years of conflict. And so they continued on work through the 20th century, and enjoyed the economic miracle of the 80s for a time, until the entire country was hit by the financial bubble burst of the early 90s. It turns out, there's only so much work he can do in the Buddhist temple market, especially if you've been doing it for nearly a millennia and a half, and especially when fewer and fewer Japanese people are turning to religion. The company's crushing debt forced it to go into liquidation in 2006, after which it was bought out by the Takamatsu Construction Group. Kanji Ogawa, the president of Takamatsu, stated that, there was some sentiment involved. It's true, if the company had gone under, all that experience and all that wonderful history would have scattered to the winds and gone to waste. Today, Gongogumi continues as Gongogumi Engineering Company Limited, a subsidiary of Takamatsu Construction Group Limited, and you can access the website here. The president of Gongogumi is Masakazu Kongo, the 50th Kongo in the long family line to preside over this ancient family business. With almost 1500 years of experience under its belt, the company continues onward, towards whatever may lie ahead. Something you might find surprising is that Gongogumi is not an anomaly on the list of oldest companies still in existence.  The question is why? The answer lies in the very nature of Japanese culture. As modern and cutting edge of their technology is today, family and tradition both hold a special place in their hearts. Companies are often passed down from father to son, or son-in-law. In this way, every time the head of a company passes, a younger member of the family takes its place, being groomed from an early age. This allows the company to be led by someone with a fresh perspective, and enables them to easily adapt to the changing times. In turn, the head of companies tend to have great commitment to the family business and desire to honor their family more than anything else. Longevity, carrying on the family name, is of the utmost importance, and more than anything else, the longevity of Gongogumi is a testament to this. If you enjoyed watching this video and want to see more interesting content, hit the thumbs up and subscribe to The Asian Theory. And remember, Japan is all about the respect.


Today I have the privilege of talking to Mike from Mike Drew Han from Medics Health Today. How are you today, Mike? I'm fine. How are you today, Trace? And Mike, we've been following Medics for a couple of years.  Is that correct? That's absolutely correct. You had an incredible stunning flow of news here in the last month and a half. How about we just start with you telling investor Intel what Medics Health is today? So what Medics is, is a teledermatology platform. Our whole platform is built on DermSecure. This is a platform that securely allows you to take patient information and images, send it to a dermatologist for assessment. We take a dermatological time frame down to about 72 hours, which is unprecedented in the market. And of course, you're joined with two new members of your team, and I say new, relatively. They've been with the team for over a year plus and we've got managing directors and sales for North America and Europe. Is that correct? Absolutely correct. Paul Zimmer and Nemanah, nobody can pronounce his last name I get. OK, so speaking of that, Mike, why don't you just take a second, introduce both of those members to the audience and tell and why don't you all introduce yourselves to our audience? Please. Thank you. Yeah, I think it would be better. Let's let's start off with Paul. Paul, a little bit about your background. Dr. Paul Zimmer.  Sure. So my background is I'm a licensed in skyropractor and in 25 years in practice. And so I know the clinic space really well, and I'm really excited to be working with medics because I believe that there are comes of times where certain devices and certain technology can rapidly change patient outcomes and patient care. And this is one of them. So understanding that the device can change patient lives and understanding where to put these devices so that the maximum number of patients can be served. That's my role in North America is to make partnerships where we can serve the most patients and understanding with the challenges the staff will have of introducing new services is what I think I bring to this role. And on the other side, we have in our European theater, we have Neman and Neman, it comes with a substantial background out of some big companies. So Neman, I'll let you speak a little bit about what you've been up to. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having us, Tracy. My name is Neman de Magletres. I have a background that spans about 25 years in health care. Major pharmaceutical and med tech companies, including Johnson and Johnson, Medtronic, and I've worked both in the European theater and the Middle East Africa region under various divisions. I joined medics about a year and a month ago. And since then, it's been an extremely exciting ride, developing the market in the Europe, Middle East Africa region. A little bit like Paul, we're using the various levers that we have for market development out there, getting the Dermsecure platform out to distributors that are connected to various verticals, whether they be pharmacies, clinics, hospitals, oncologists, etc. So extremely excited to join the team. We've had some great successes about after a year of doing some homework. And we're excited that January will start a number of pilots that I'm sure we'll be able to discuss throughout this interview. All right.  You can do anything. Why medics? And I'm going to start with you first, Paul, why medics? Why would you take your, you know, your power proctor, you know, experience and join the medics health team? The reason is because I believe this is one of the quickest ways that we can actually save a lot of lives. So technology doesn't always work for you. All right. So I don't always know all the features of my phone or all the features of my computer. What medics has built is a three pronged approach to capture images, transmit information securely so that the smart people, the dermatologists, radiologists, other people, wound care specialists can look at patients remotely and quickly. So for me, it's more about getting the services into the hands of the people that can serve the most number of patients. And that's what makes me really excited about it. This is not a difficult technology to learn. It's a fantastic technology to implement in a clinic. And it's a little more important than some other things. We're going to save a lot of lives doing this, and we're going to relieve a lot of stress on the health care system, not only the people working in it, but the patients that are in it. So that's why I'm passionate about it. And like I said earlier, I believe that if we understand the clinic space, what happens in a clinic day to day, and I'm seeing this every day, talking to clinics all over North America, they understand this is easy to implement in their practice. So they're very happy to do it. It's not difficult for them to to integrate. And what about you, I'm going to ask you the same question. Many of us have been following Mike for a couple of years now. What made you join this team? Sure. Well, Tracy, the first time I had a discussion with Mike, I was building my own startup in Switzerland in Basel. And the goal of that really was to move towards a value based health care proposal where you are able to democratize the access of health care. And after an hour and a half of talking with Mike, I thought this is exactly what I am trying to build myself. Moving the health care systems today to a more patient centric approach accessibility. And COVID, if COVID has taught us anything, is that it is fundamental that health care be at the very fingerprints of those that need it the most. So MedEx, with its DermSecure platform, able to go into any mobile remote area, giving access to the best specialists in dermatology is just that. It answered the question and it answered the quest that I was looking for. Well, Mike, you said you'd do it. You said you would build a global sales team, OK? Obviously, you have congratulations and for everyone out there at Investor Intel Land, this is MedEx Health. Thank you, team. Thank you.


Hi, Restaurants in Hawaii. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Think Tech on a Human Monday morning, and we're talking about how restaurants are encouraging tourists to return with Restaurants in Hawaii, and more specifically with Cheryl Matsuoka, who runs it. Hi, Cheryl. Welcome to your own show. Okay. Aloha, Jay. And yes, restaurants are encouraging our tourists to return to Hawaii. I'd like to introduce my two guests, Jay. Okay. Alan Farrinas, owner of Shorefire. He has Showfire Fresh Grill and Bar. He has two locations, both in Waikiki, both welcoming restaurants and welcoming tourists to come back. He's been waiting for this day where tourism can open up. And I'd like to introduce Rebecca. Rebecca, I'm going to say your last name. Tomakter. Tomakter. And she is the manager of Uncle Bo's and Yaya's chop house and seafood. Yaya's had just opened up when the pandemic hit. And so she's going to talk about a little bit about how they're welcoming and encouraging tourists to come into their locations.  Okay, well, let me let me give you my thoughts to start. And that is okay, where we're going to start tourism. And it'll be ups and downs and it'll swing hundreds or thousands every time they change the paradigm and they will, because we're not out of this yet. And the question is, you know, what happens when a tourist comes here? And in case we forgot, you know, a big part of tourism in Hawaii is food. It's local food. It's exotic food. It's good food. It's interesting food. It's interesting ambiance and all that. And the fact is that it's part of the reason, you know, people come to Hawaii, it's not only that they eat while they're here, it's they come here so they can eat. I love that. Okay, so restaurants are critically important and will be more important than this really enough goodwill and enough, what do you want to call it, food magnetism to keep you guys going. But you have to be innovative. You have to, you know, belly up to new ideas. You have to be thinking all the time and watching, you know, how the industry is doing, watching how the tourism industry is doing so you can satisfy not only their needs, but their, you know, their perspective needs, their aspirational needs. Okay, let's let's talk to you first, Rebecca.  You start your restaurant in Bingo, this Corvid, you know, welcome to the industry that your COVID is telling you a little virus things in your ears, and you're welcome to the industry. So what did you do to adapt when all this happened? Right, man, what a whirlwind. Really, initially, we wanted to keep the momentum and energy, but stop the haemorrhaging of, you know, production, sea salt. So we really kind of hunkered down and just tried to wait out the storm.  We're really hoping with tourism reigniting, not just to be able to welcome tourists back, but our local patrons. Hopefully now with tourist back in the economy, there's money flowing back to our locals, and we can welcome them back through our doors. So October 15 was definitely an important day for us. For Yaya's, we are located in the heart of Cacaco, just adjacent to salt on Oahu's south shore. So tell us what, you know, what you've done that we would consider innovative and creative in the interim to, you know, get off the regular path of restaurants in Hawaii and become especially interesting to tourists. You know, that's a great question because typically our philosophy hasn't been much in your face marketing. It's been very organic, viral marketing, word of mouth, focusing on delicious food with a great ambiance where people want to gather and enjoy themselves and let our business kind of speak for itself. So with not having the audience physically around too much, a lot has been relied on social media marketing and just reminding people that dining out is enjoyable. It's a good time. It's what you want to do. So as soon as we're able to allow that and we can welcome you back through our doors, come see us and you'll have a great time. So have you been successful in the interim? How many seats are you filling? How many days are you operating? And what kinds of things are you doing to improve those numbers? So we're still at half capacity as mandated, but we are knock on wood, some wood around me. We've been able to, you know, fill our seats. The interest is there. The uptick happened with tourism reopening on October 15. We are also trying to reward our locals. And especially with the Hawaii restaurant card, we're offering fantastic promotion during the weekdays with a 25% off of your food tab. That's been exciting. We also have really tried to geared towards a good food experience for takeout and things for guests to enjoy at home or at their hotel. We've focused on our craft cocktails, craft cocktails to go, go take this, enjoy the beach or outside where it's allowed to drink, those types of things. Okay. So I guess my question is, have you changed anything? Have you changed your menu? Have you changed the way you bring people in for takeout? Have you changed your staff? They're still with you. We have. We never can become complacent in our industry. So we're evolving and adapting. We have had to change our menu slightly for when we closed for inventory things. And we've tried to keep, you know, the local sense of our menu to intrigue our tourist guests and also locals love to eat good local food, great prime steaks. We have had to change and evolve. Have you had any issues with supply? Yes. Things are improving now. We did have issues with supply, getting things to the island. There was a lot of fear, especially in March and April of what was going to be allowed to come in, how, what would the cost be? So we're really taking it week by week with our vendors and trying to work with them. And supply has been an issue with things coming out of Japan. Our A5 Wagyu from Japan was a concern at a point to bring that in, which is an important component to our menu. We're just keeping an eye on things and trying to keep up. Are we able to pay the bills or have you needed help? Do you get any cares money? Do you get any money from the city and county? We're doing our best to, you know, reach out and apply for all things that are applicable to us. We have had to restructure some things internally, of course, to again stop the hemorrhaging and stay afloat. It has not been smooth sailing, but we're doing our best working with our landlords and, you know, our vendors and just continuing to build relationships for an understanding of we got to get through this together. So we're doing what we can. Okay. Let's get to Alan for a minute. Alan, can you, can you compare your restaurant and your experience here in COVID with the experience Rebecca has had? Yes. So we are in Waikiki, of course. We closed, I believe, our co-op location, which is behind the Hyatt. I think it was March 23rd or something like that or one of those days. And then we kept the International Marketplace location open a few days after that until basically there were just no more tourists. And so we completely closed. And we, when we reopened, we were reopened that first time in August, but then they shut us down the other two weeks. When we did reopen, our general manager, Alan Wolcher, he's just really amazing at coming up with ideas to keep us afloat and, you know, really just broadening us forward. We had an idea and also we also use modern media, which is Flash and Sydney. And they're very connected in the community with the musicians and stuff. So we all came up with the ideas of doing the contract series over at Shortfire. We had to figure out how to bring locals to Waikiki. How do we become a destination so people come into Waikiki? Because we all know locals typically don't want to come to Waikiki. We don't want to come to Waikiki because, you know, if we're going to come to Waikiki and we drink, there's cops everywhere. So you don't want to come to Waikiki. In addition to that, it's packed everywhere. The parking fees are atrocious, you know, in Waikiki. So there was just not a lot of, I mean, you really had to be motivated to be able to come to Waikiki, whether it was for surfing or a staycation or something. So we had to be pretty creative. So we came up with a bunch of, all the musicians were out of work. So we figured we could support our musicians and support ourselves too. And so basically what we did was we created these weekend concert series where Friday, Saturday and Sunday from six o'clock to eight o'clock p.m. on our open-air lanai, we socially distanced all the tables six feet apart. And I think we can only have 35 ticket holders out there somewhere in that range. And it's been successful. So the artists get to keep all of the whatever they're charging for their fee for that whole weekend. And the customers are purchasing those tickets on Eventbrite and stuff like that, Ticketmaster. And we're selling out all the time. People are just dying to get out. People are just waiting. And so like when we opened originally in August, we had all our concerts sold out. The last one was supposed to be Kingdom Spades. And it ended up happening where they shut us down again. And so we contacted all the ticket holders and we said, I'm so sorry, we'll refund your money. They're like, no, don't refund my money. Please hold on to my money. Just keep my space because I want to go out after this thing's done. So we did. And everybody was like that. Everybody's just dying to go out. So the concert series have been a blessing. It's not only helped us in our numbers, but it's also helped the musicians too. Now, because we are in Waikiki and we're on the Lanai and we're not enclosed inside, other people can hear us. So the tourists are now coming upstairs because they hear all the music of what's going on. And so we're still at 50% capacity, which kind of sucks. But eventually, I know that will be lifted. And so we've created different things like some of the social distance barriers and between our booths and other things like that. In addition to a barrier, what kind of a barrier is that? Well, what we're what we're doing is we built these little plexiglass wood frames that we attached to the wall. So that's pretty much what we had to do. That's a really good idea. Yeah. Yeah. And then all of our tables are distanced outside. So that that's helped because you can have a live music in the open air. So a lot of people don't have that open air, so they don't have that option. Gratefully, we have that option so that we're able to do that. But we're taking people's temperatures at the door. We're doing contract tracing, getting their addresses, all the things that are required for us to do. Employees with gloves. Everybody, all the employees are getting tempt when they come before they step even into the property. We're tempting them because we can see them from the office that someone's coming in. So they know the way to the door. So we're trying to be very, very careful. Haven't had any cases and everybody's just been really, really happy that we're open and that we're doing what we're doing. So I think there's been a lot more gratitude from the public rather than kind of like, oh my God, they're, you know, they're, they're super spreader event or something like that, which, you know, of course, isn't true. So I think we've been getting a lot of good feedback and it's been extremely busy and every concert that we do moving forward has been selling out. But besides that, we do have a limited menu. We haven't, we're not offering everything on our menu. So we cut back our menu a little bit. Our hours have changed at this international marketplace location. We used to be open from 8am till 2am. After 10pm, we would turn into a nightclub from 10am, 10pm to 2am. So we'd have salsa nights. We'd have nightclub nights, New Year's parties. It was like just the heart of white sheep. And now we can only stay open till 10. So of course we shut down and we open on weekdays at 3pm and stay open till only 10. So we're only open for those seven hours because there's no lunch business yet. Not enough to keep us open. And there's not enough breakfast business when we used to be open to 8am. So we're playing it careful. But on the weekends, we're doing a little something different. We are opening at 10am and then closing at 10pm. So we're noticing that people are out to eat brunch. You know, they want that we serve brunch from 10 to 10 to 2. So and then our happy hour starts at 3.30 because we open at 3. So that whole schedule has been kind of working. We've done things that like $3 Heineken's because locals love Heineken's, right? But tourists love Heineken's too. So we've lowered our prices. We also give up 15% off for Kama Inas always. And if you're using the restaurant card, we're giving you happy hour on all the happy hour food items all day and all night long. So you get that discount on that also. But besides that, I think it's going pretty well. The tourists are coming in quick and they're here and they're just happy to be here. I think they're all just waiting. They're playing tickets for waiting for them to arrive. So yeah, we're excited to have them back. And I think everybody's being careful. They respect that we're being really careful at the door. I know it's frustrating when you go to a restaurant. You have to pretty much wait in line to be tested and stand five feet apart. And everybody's getting used to it now. So at the end of the day, everybody's leaving safe. And some of the other things that we're doing to attract people here are radio commercials through iHeart station through flash. He's also over there too and helps us out with that. So we're making funny kind of local style commercials. Hey, Chimo, come on down. That kind of fun stuff. So trying to get just a mix of everything. You could be on those commercials, Allen. That's good. Actually, I wrote them and I started recording them. But they have a couple local guys at the office. It's sound more authentic than my pigeon does. But I think we're just trying to do everything that we can.  And Cheryl has just been amazing. Cheryl's been reaching out to us and giving us advice on whether it's just PPP loan things or this and that. So the Hawaii Restaurant Association has been a huge asset to have on our side because who else would be fighting for us? I mean, who else would be talking, giving us advice on stuff? We don't know who else. So we're grateful for Cheryl and her organization and what they've been doing for us too. Okay, Rebecca, you've been listening, right? Have you been taking notes on this? I thought I saw you taking notes a minute ago. What is that Allen is doing is something you could emulate? Yeah, I love the ideas. Live music has been very trending and of interest with our local community. So if that was an opportunity for us at our locations, that would be something that we would love to have. I love the happy hour for locals. They do love that happy hour. We offer a happy hour all day at our bar, but our bar is limited seating. So we've had to encroach our dining space and outdoor patio area for those happy hour loving folks. Lots of good ideas. Yeah, I'm reminded of, I date myself, the Hawaiian region in Manukawa years ago. They had Kanaka Pila. Oh, Cheryl was there. I don't know what it is now. Cheryl, do you know what it is now? It was really popular. You put a few musicians in, you haven't seen a little slack key whatnot, and people come from miles around. You can't tear them out of there. It's so good. Cheryl, have you got any reactions to this? Where is this going as far as you can see? Yes, absolutely. All of the media has been welcoming back our tourists. As you know, the Visitors' Bureau and D-Bed, the message for the Hawaii Restaurant Association, we are putting in all the safety guidelines. We're following the CDC, the FDA, the Department of Health. As you hear, Alan and Rebecca are practicing all the safe protocols. So the message to our tourists is it's a safe destination. We're safe for our state. I just saw the numbers by this weekend. We are not a red state. It's safe to come here. I think they're going to start wanting, as the snow rolls in, as the cold rolls in through the mainland, to come to Paradise and enjoy not only our beauty of our islands, but the wonderful food and all of the different cuisines that they can enjoy. I've been to Yaya's, and they have an outdoor seating. Alan is all open air, and that's safe. A lot of the tourists, that's what they look for, is they look for enjoying the, you know, Hawaii has a certain smell. Right? So when you're in Hawaii, you want to be in open air, and Yaya's has an open air seating right outside their restaurant. Alan has a lanai, and he overlooks, literally, if you look down from his lanai, you see Kala Kala Avenue, like literally. And he has all, you know, glass, it's beautiful. So I think our tourists are going to really enjoy coming back and coming back to our restaurants. Yeah, you know, the idea of having entertainment, you know, and music, of course, is number one, but there are other things too. Who knows what? You could show people how to make sushi. Who knows what? You could give them a, what, what are you turning your camera again? Oh, I was going to show you the lanai. This is a dynamic program. Yes, it is. Whenever you have, whenever you have restaurant tours on, restaurant tours are very dynamic. They're very clean. Restaurant tours are clean. And we'll set up over there, and it's all over there. We got a ocean view over there that you can kind of see.  So everybody's kind of distanced apart. And here's Kala Kala. So basically, our music plays and everybody in the world or out here can hear it. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Well, you know, your comments really make me think that this is a time for developing brand loyalty, not only among tourists, but among locals, like those people who are perfectly happy to let you keep their money on the failed concert. That's a statement. You know, it's like the opera. The opera could not, you know, actually perform some of the operas that were scheduled for the Hawaii opera theater season. And they said, well, you know, you can ask for your money back, we'll give you money back, you can let us keep your money, and it'll be a support thing.  We love you. We support you. In the time of COVID, you know, we have brand loyalty. And I think this is a time to exploit that, if you don't mind me using that term, but also develop it, you know, for the future, which takes me to the next question. I want to ask both of you guys. And so COVID should not be a big surprise. Despite President Trump's remarks about turning the corner, COVID is not over. And it's probably not going to be over for a while. And whatever you're doing now, you know, is a solution maybe, until now. But you've got to keep on coming up with stuff. You got to have ideas in the pipeline. You got to, you know, maintain your relevance and your cachet, because COVID is going to be corrosive the longer it goes on.  You know what I mean? We can't give all of our secrets away. You know, holidays right around the corner, we have some great ideas to welcome our, you know, holiday parties back in safely. Some great to go box items and continuing the happy hour trends and the rewarding locals for their patronage trends. And you'll just have to keep following us and wait to see. You know, I first started practicing law was before any of you people were born. And my boss said to me, Jay, in your legal career, never, never forget one rule. What's that? You should never underestimate the power of parking. And Rebecca Allen was talking about that. You know, it seems to me that the city and county or the Waikiki Improvement Association or the Hawaii Lodging Tourism Association really wanted to do guys a favor. What they would do is somehow support the parking. Because it is really an ugly experience to come to Waikiki for anything and have to go through the parking. I mean, Allen mentioned that completely. And I would like to, I would like to mention that the international marketplace, the manager has been very, very flexible with us through these challenging times. They're just really awesome landlords. And what they've done is they've given us a four hour validation for anybody that comes for our concert series. So that's a nice big thing.  Yeah. So what about you, Rebecca? You have parking issues? Is there anything you can do to improve your, you know, your experience by improving the parking? We are fairly fortunate to have parking available and validation accompanying your dine-in. And as of now, parking hasn't been too much of an adversity for us, thankfully, just outside of Waikiki. So we don't have those issues over there. Okay. The other thing I wanted to ask about is something I mentioned before the show began. And that is, you know, Rebecca, you mentioned that you have new ideas, new packaging for takeout, you know? And I think for local people, takeout is pretty important because, you know, I can't stand being my house anymore, I got to get out, even if it's just to go buy a takeout. I don't care about eating it, I just want to get out of the house and get it. Just want to feel it in your hands. Smell it in the car, you know? So the question is, what can we do to make takeout really wonderful? And, you know, to me, it's part of the question I was asking earlier. What can we do going forward when COVID continues? So how do you see takeout evolving, Rebecca? You know, I think it's still going to be an important component of our restaurant and our business and continuing to be able to have the food look, smell, taste delicious just as it would on a plate sitting at one of our tables. You know, the only thing that they would be missing would be the service component.  So just being thoughtful of how people are going to take your item home or wherever there may be to enjoy together.  Yeah, I think there's all kinds of possibilities. I mean, for example, I get the limited number of people I can to come to my family picnic. Alan and I, and I would like to have a wonderful meal. So I called you up and I say, can you deliver X units of this and that and the other thing to Alamo on a park where I'm going to be sitting with my family? And just call me when you're ready to meet me at the curb. And I'll come and get it at the roadway that goes through Alamo, just for example. I mean, are you doing that? Are you doing this kind of catering thing, either directly or through Uber or Lyft or what have you? Well, that was something in the future for you. Yeah, so what we've done is before we actually reopened again, we've already engaged our bite squad, our grub hub. And I think we're doing Uber Eats too, just to be able to cover all the bases for the takeout side. Because if we like, like typically, we don't deliver internally, just because we are not staffed for that, we haven't set that component part of our business up. But when people contact us for different types of caterings, we get a lot of military requests for catering because we have some friends over there and they're always wanting our food. So I'll drive it out there, you know, right after it's prepared and I'll deliver it personally if it's kind of a larger order. But every other order does go through the delivery components that are set up through grub hub and bite squad and stuff ready. Okay, you're not reluctant to do that. Are you in agreement, Rebecca? This is what you would do too. You would get this done somehow using Uber Eats or one of the others to my picnic in Alamo. Right now, we're kind of in the boat with our wiki key friends and, you know, we're working with a very small crew, but we want to make it happen. So we've been doing our best to just be in all hands on deck to make those types of requests and accommodations. We haven't partnered yet with a formal delivery team, but it likely is in the very near future. Yeah, good. So before the show began, I was, this is what I was getting to last question really is the idea of getting into the supply line for the big food markets and, you know, doing vacuum pack, you need a machine for that. Doing a flash frozen, you need a machine for that. Gotta have labels and then you could probably sell your packaged meals to Safeway or one of those. Any interest in that or is the investment too expensive? Alan? So my wife and I also used to own a company called Grilt and we were in like Alamoana, Alamoana, and Grilt also did meal prep. So we had a company called Built by Grilt.com, which focused 100% on meal prep and the difference with our meal prep is you could customize each meal. Whereas typically meal preps out there, you kind of got to buy a group of, or a series of meals that might be the same as what everybody else gets. So I had a lot of experience in the meal prep. I actually built all my own meal prep business websites and the components to it and everything. When we closed the last Grilt restaurant, that component went with it too. We were thinking of keeping it and now through COVID, we're thinking of bringing it back. But it's a whole other ballgame because we just have different stuff and it would just take a lot of time to engineer the website. So it would be seamless because what people were doing before is they'd go onto my website. They would basically choose their proteins, choose their starts to their veggie. How many options do they want? When do they want to pick it up? What location they want to pick it up? They could choose any of our retail locations. So it was already in microwavable containers and stuff like that. But because we have totally different food at short fire, I never even thought of doing meal prep out of here because we've always been so busy with just tourist business typically. So it is something that we have discussed. I don't know if we're ramped up to do that because now the tourists are coming back. So it might not be necessary to do it. But we're willing to do anything to stay open. We just don't want to close. We had 97 people that we laid off and we brought about 50 of them back so far because we only opened this international marketplace location. The other location is there's not enough tourists to open that location up yet. Alan, do you see a time when there will be consolidation of restaurants where some well-heeled investor from the mainland will come and say, you know, these guys really are pretty good. They're resilient. They know how to stay in business. I'm going to buy them.  Some of them are going to be on the same block. And I'm going to be a restaurateur that's going to own all the restaurants that need to be sold. You see that happening? This is the thing is, you know, our business needs us. And to sell our business just to someone coming from the mainland, I'm not interested in that. We didn't build this business and work this hard.  So there's a lot of infusion of Hawaiian here. You know what I mean? Like I'm not Hawaiian, but I basically have been here all my life. You can do a pretty good pigeon. I'm not going to go there. But I think, you know, like understanding this market and the components that I go through on a daily basis from even just guys on the street, marketing, passing out flyers, stuff like that, some mainland owner, it won't work. These business owners need my wife and I. It's our passion. It's like what we love to do, what would we do? I don't know. I'd be bored every day. So I love doing, I come here every day at 5 a.m. and work on stuff. So it's my passion. So I don't know if I would never sell it. So Rebecca, where do you stand on all those things? Yeah. No, I echo what Alan says. Our company is locally owned, homegrown. So we run the same boat. I hear you. Yeah. Okay. All right. Cheryl, it's time for you to summarize. What have we learned today? What profound truths have broken through to you, Cheryl? Tell us about the overarching wisdom here. As I've mentioned before, Jay, our restaurants are ready. We are looking forward to welcoming all of our tourists back. And as you can hear by just these two restaurateurs, they're already implementing all the different things so that if the tourists don't want to leave their hotel room for a meal, they can take out. And that is the resounding. Some people still don't want to go into a restaurant, but they enjoy eating the Hawaiian food and all of the blend. So they both have outdoor dining. It's also very safe to eat in an outdoor, fresh air dining. The Hawaii Restaurant Association, as Alan said, is a resource. And we are the voice of Hawaii's food service and restaurant industry. And as always, Jay, we look forward to dining together again. Thank you, Cheryl. Thank you, Alan. Thank you, Rebecca. Great to talk to you guys. Yeah, carry on. Stay safe. Take care.


I'm Arthur Nailor, I'm the Interim Principal here at St Mary's, and it's my very pleasant responsibility and duty to introduce Professor John Nicholson's inaugural lecture. John Nicholson is a very distinguished materials scientist whose research concerns advanced materials for the repair of teeth and bones. Since coming to St Mary's, he's actually been very much more than a great research scientist. He's leading on a new degree in applied physics with the National Physical Laboratory, and he's also the interim head of the School of Health and Applied Science, of Sport Health and Applied Science, and I must say, after a few weeks back, a very, very great asset to St Mary's. John studied chemistry at Kingston University as doctorates from London South Bank. He then joined the laboratory of the government chemist in 1983, where he eventually became head of materials research, next he moved to teach and research at the Dental Institute of King's College London, before taking up a personal chair in biomaterials chemistry at the University of Greenwich in 2002. And joined St Mary's as Professor of Applied Science in 2012. John, tonight, is going, well that's the title, Long in the Tooth, and he tells me that tooth decay is generally considered to be the most prevalent of all human diseases. Actually coming from Scotland, that's something you'd recognise, because the combined effect of sweets, cakes, and deep fried Mars bars, it means that it's quite prevalent from an early age. In fact, I was looking at the statistics, because Scotland's got a desperate record in dental decay, but it's sad, it's awful that a third of primary one children have dental decay. It used to be 50%. So this is going to be a fascinating evening for those of us who remember dentistry with absolute horror in our own time.  Thank you, and after that introduction, I can't wait to hear what I've got to say. I called today's talk, Long in the Tooth, partly in recognition of my extreme personal advancing years, but I wanted to add the subtitle, The Physics of Tooth Repair, again partly because, as Arthur's mentioned, I'm here in part at St Mary's to lead the new applied research. My physics degree, and so I thought it was appropriate to mention physics in the context of this talk. I could have equally said the material science of Tooth Repair, and that's what we're going to be looking at tonight. As we go through, I will drop hints, not very subtle ones, about my personal contribution to this field, where I'm going to be talking about my research. But before we do that, I want to thank, firstly, everybody who's come. It's a very interesting collection as I look round the faces in the audience of new colleagues, former colleagues, old friends and family members, and I do appreciate the fact that all of you have spared the time tonight, and I just hope, as I say, I make it worth your while. So tonight I'm going to be looking at these aspects of the subject. We will start with some fairly dramatic discussion about the horrible topic of Tooth Decay, and then we're going to move on and look at how teeth are repaired. I'm going to take as the third point modern materials, the kind of materials I've been working on, not as my exclusive research concern, but as my main ones, for about the last 30 years, and I shall finish by saying a little bit about some of our current research activities. Current in the sense that I'm still writing some of them up, and in the sense that they represent some of the future work that we're going to be doing here, partly at some areas and also with our involvement with National Physical Laboratory. The one person who can't be here, but I would like to pay tribute to, and this is Dr Alan Wilson, who was my mentor in this field. He was my head of department when I was at the laboratory of the government chemist. He was a brilliantly inventive scientist, and he invented the particular tooth material, the glass enormous cement that I'll be spending quite a lot of time talking about. And he, although he was my boss, we ended up becoming good friends, and he came to work with me when I moved to the King's Dental Institute. He was honorary senior research fellow there for several years, and in fact we published together what turned out to be his last paper in 2004. As he told me with some regret, he didn't quite make 50 years of publishing. His first paper was published in 1955, and so I did try, but we couldn't quite squeeze any more data out to give him his 50th year. But a very engaging man, and I wanted to honour him tonight at the beginning of my lecture. So now let's think about tooth decay, this horrible subject which we all have some idea about and no doubt some personal experience of. So here is a tooth, a typical sort of tooth, and these are the kind of components of the tooth that we need to be aware of. First of all, let me just see if I can work this one. Right, here is a tooth sitting in its socket in a piece of bone. The bone sort of rises to carry the tooth in what is known as the alveola ridge, and running around the edge we have something that keeps it in place, the periodontal ligament. This may cause problems, but we're not going to be talking about those while we're concerned with teeth. I'm going to be thinking about the upper part of the tooth, and the upper part of the tooth is divided into three zones. On the outer layer we have the enamel. The enamel is a substantially mineral tissue, it's the hardest tissue in the body. It's made up of a mineral called hydroxyapatite, and about 97% of the enamel is made up of this mineral. There's a few other bits and pieces in there, a pinch of water, a tiny bit of protein, but mainly it's the mineral phase. Below it, in this sort of off-white colour, we have the dentine, and that consists of the mineral phase, about 70%, and the rest made up of water and of protein molecules, a type of collagen. There's a sort of structure here, because running through the dentine are tubules which are filled with liquid. That structure makes a difference to the way dental decay progresses. Right inside we have what is known as the pulp, which consists of a mixture of blood vessels and nerve endings. We will see both of those are significant when tooth decay takes hold. Here's what the healthy tooth consists of, the mineral phase, and something about the mineral phase which is not immediately obvious, I think to those of us not involved in dental research or in dentistry, and that is that the mineral phase is dynamic. You might think that if anything is going to be left of you in about 500 years when the 26th century version of Tony Robinson is running time team, it will be your teeth and your bones, and therefore they must be fairly innocuous, they must be sort of there. They are the bits on which you hang the flesh and the muscles and the bits that you recognise, but everything else is pretty dead. The answer is that's not true, and it's not true particularly of the teeth because the mineral phase is dynamic. It's bathed by saliva, and saliva contains, among other things, calcium and phosphate ions. What happens is that as the local concentration may rise for some reason, these calcium and phosphate ions combine as the hydroxyl appetite mineral and are deposited, and somewhere else you may have a bit of the saliva that's a little bit depleted in calcium and phosphate so the tooth dissolves. We end up with a cycle, sometimes incorrectly referred to as an equilibrium, but a cycle where we have some deposition of mineral phase known as remineralisation and some loss of mineral phase known as demineralisation, and this cyclic process is happily taking place all the time in your healthy teeth.  So your teeth are dynamic, and they're happily looking after themselves bathed by this saliva and everything should be well. However, there is a problem, and the problem is twofold. Amals have got a layer on the teeth of microorganisms, a sort of colony, the main one is streptocopus mutens, but there are others in that colony, and they sit on the tooth surface or they stick on the tooth surface. They depart briefly when you brush your teeth, but when they can they are back on there, and they will metabolise sugar, and when they metabolise sugar you get acid produced. You get particularly lactic acid, and there's been some really elegant research over the years that has analysed in great detail the cocktail of acids that these microorganisms can produce and evaluate their effect. It doesn't take very much, the surface of your tooth doesn't have to be especially acidic, and the demineralisation, remineralisation balance is unbalanced, and it starts to favour the demineralisation, so your mineral phase starts to be lost. What happens then in time, if nothing is done about it, is the tooth softens and discolours. In order for that to happen the dental decay, the so-called dental caries, has to progress through the enamel into the dentine, but that is certainly an interesting staging post in the loss of structure of your teeth when they start to decay. Here's a diagram to show the effects, and I'll try to divide this into three stages. First of all we have early decay, which only affects the enamel, and it says here this damage is reversible. It's a bit like the damage you would do by eating rhubarb, that will reverse itself if you remove the source of the acid and you let the natural remineralisation activity of the saliva take place. That may not be what happens because the other possibility is that the decay goes through the dentine, and then it does something that's important, it sort of balloons out, it spreads, and it spreads because the dentine is lower in mineral phase, it's also got structure through which the acids can penetrate and through which the microorganisms can operate, and so there's a spreading out of the dental decay. And so when you are in the dentist's chair and he or she comes at you with a mirror and a probe, what they're doing is poking the tooth to see if those little openings may conceivably be the start of dental decay because it means you could well have very significant spread out of sight of the dentist going on below the layer of enamel. And then if you don't do anything about it, if you are stoic or if you're a dental phobic, whatever your motivation, the whole thing spreads and it goes into the nerve, into the blood vessels and so on, as it says here, accompanied by severe toothache, and eventually you can damage the root canals and do further damage to your body. Toothache always seems a bit of a joke, but it's actually not because of what it leads to. Now here's a decayed tooth. It's not the most in focus of the pictures, but I thought all the others were so revolting I couldn't possibly show them to a polite audience. There are some really horrendous things. So you really want to make yourself feel ill, have a look at tooth decay on Google and have a look at some of the pictures there. But you can see what's happened. There is this discoloration as this carries a spread. And you get this pain. You get a pain that occurs because the nerves in the pulp are affected. That's the first point. You have nerves inside your teeth. You may have an inflammation that starts squeezing the nerves. Whatever it is, you get a pain. And once upon a time the people who studied this considered that this was probably caused by an organism that they would have ever seen called the toothworm. It may not have seen it, but they certainly knew what it did because here is an ivory carving that shows the toothworm. And this actually fits together. So it's got all the components of toothache that we know and love and hate. Here's the worm. It's got its tail well wrapped around some poor person. But more importantly on this side we have the fires of hell which represent the pain and clearly the fires are being, the flames are being fanned to keep them going well, which I'm sure is anybody's experience who's ever had tooth decay and toothache of this sort. So that was what they thought was happening, I don't know, four or five hundred years ago. We know better now, but we've got to think about how we treat it. Now one question that we might ask is does it matter? And there are various answers to this. Clearly it does matter because the decay tooth is a sort of focus of infection and it can lead to all sorts of other unpleasant side effects or effects. For example you can get an infection that leads to the heart called endocarditis, which nobody would want. You can also get a condition called Ludwig's angina, which in its worst manifestation causes swelling to travel down the neck and the patient to suffocate. So toothache is non-trivial. Tooth decay is non-trivial and we need to remember that. Over the idea that teeth are nasty things because of the really significantly high quality dentistry we've had in this country for a long time.  And that was a very common preventive measure. If you haven't got any teeth they can't decay and you can't get all these conditions. Unfortunately there are problems with that, not least that your alveolar ridge disappears. So by the time you get into your 50s and 60s you can't balance any dentures on anything so you can't eat anything except soup or drink things through a straw. So it wasn't a wise move and we must be grateful that's no longer considered a good idea, but that certainly was the sort of treatment that people had. So it does matter. The question is what do we do about it? And when I say we I'm now referring to dental profession, now we've got at least one of my dental colleagues here in the audience so I hope I'm getting it all right so far. So what do we do? Well the first thing is to remove the damaged tooth tissue. That tissue is infected, it's got microorganisms, busily metabolising, busily making this acid and causing further tooth decay so that's got to be removed. And in the conventions of dentistry for a long time all of the damaged tissue was removed and that doesn't necessarily have to happen in all cases now but pretty much you cut out the tooth tissue. And you wonder why you go to the dentist and you've got a big hole in the tooth from acid attack, why does the dentist start drilling. There are two reasons for that as we will see but one of them is to remove the damaged tissue. And then of course we replace that with artificial material and for a long time this was the material and indeed it still is. I used to have a colleague in my days taught at King's College who used to give a lecture called Amalgam the Materials of the Future and it's not just because he was old fashioned it's because he was making quite an important point and a provocative point that Amalgam still works pretty well. Now if we have as we have had not only in Scotland a reduction in the instance of tooth decay and actually with respect to our esteem principle in most places the reduction in tooth decay is a bit more impressive than the statistics he gave us. People don't want to have their first filling in their 30s and have a massive great cut out of the tooth and a working great bit of silver put in place. So these are no longer really considered by many people to be the desirable way to do dentistry but it's still very effective it works and the whole response of the result of the tooth is functional. It's another illustration I didn't mind taking pictures of Amalgam fillings they're not so bad but increasingly people are interested in tooth coloured and I will then say aesthetic materials. Now the profession will refer to these as aesthetic but I want to make it very clear what I mean because again from my days teaching at King's College in the dental school I started a lecture but I think my lecture was probably called aesthetic tooth materials and a student came up to me from a different ethnicity and said I don't understand what you're talking about because we find gold teeth quite attractive so they thought that was aesthetic. Well depends on your taste and your aesthetics but clinical dentists think that teeth are aesthetic and I'm trying to agree with them so I'm going to be talking about tooth coloured materials. And really we have two broad classes of material there are subsets there are hybrids of these but I don't want to take you too far down that path. I regret not being able to do so in a way because my absolute citation classic which has been cited 261 times is on the classification of modern dental restorative materials so I could have taken you through that and it would only been the sounds of other people in the row snoring that would have kept you going. So I don't want to do that but I want to just talk about these basic essential classes of material and let's go back a bit. Let's talk first about the composite resins which are the more successful more widely used of the tooth coloured materials. Essentially these are plastic fillings and when they were first on the market they came as two paste so it was very similar to gluing something together with araldite when you use these you had two tubes and you mixed two rather viscous paste together and that was your filling material. Now they do things a bit more subtly in terms of the chemistry you have one paste still fairly viscous it's put into position in the tooth and then it's cured with light that means it's turned from being a sticky viscous paste into being a solid plastic material. They look very good they have actually got extremely good aesthetics their problem is that they don't stick to the tooth surface none of the materials we talked about do so far and therefore they need special glues which are known as bonding agents. And it's worth having a little aside here because glues as a technology adhesives is a growing area of physical science people are increasingly impressed by the ability to glue things together so if you fly in the latest passenger jet lots of it's glued together and if you buy a very modern car lots of that's glued together and if you ask the technologist the scientist working on that they'll tell you it's alright as long as you don't get them wet which is great and they don't in the bits they've got. In a plane or a car but in the mouth you have a little bit of a problem with this requirement and the durability of these bonding agents is a live issue now it's sometimes difficult to persuade the clinicians and some of the researchers it's a live issue but it is and if you look at the durability look at what's happening in terms of how these glues are degrading there is a problem here so these things do look great they're very very successful materials but they are not without their problems. So this is what they look like now when the dentist or possible dental nurse opens the box they come in these black tubes now I said they were light cured so obviously you can't have them in a clear bottle or something because otherwise they'd set hard so you have them in a black tube to protect them from light. They normally come with a few other bottles of jollop to actually stick them in place and my picture that I inadvertently let to here is some happy man having a composite resin placed the little probe here showing the light shining on the filled tooth. And I hope everybody is having an dental treatment in this way now swallowing a what looks like a piece of rubber glove this is known as the rubber dam and is a way of isolating air and making it dry which is very important for the modern materials. And this is a kind of repair you can get with a composite this is actually the before somebody here has had some sort of trauma and I know it's the same sort of thing that happened to my niece she fell off her horse and broke a front tooth and so the tooth has now been repaired this is a repaired tooth repaired with composite resin and that is a phenomenal repair. There are several things about it that's phenomenal the first is the color is brilliant in the words of Eric Morgan you cannot see the join and the color not only has got the color right but there's a hint of translucency that you get in the tooth and as well as that the mechanical properties of the composite are going to be good enough for it to survive for quite a long time. It's particular property is that it's a tough material. It's got enough giving it that it can be used on the biting surface of the tooth and you can expect it to survive as indeed it will in fact it's a little bit tougher than the natural tooth that it replaced. And so the key property and I want to talk about this because of some of my research interests the key property of the composite resin is toughness and at this point I'd like to have a little digression into some of these concepts from material science. I want to talk a little bit about what we mean by toughness. First of all it's a material property if something's tough it's tough whether you have a big lump of it or a very small piece and it's generally considered the opposite of brittleness. So let's explore this a little more detail. Let's us consider some experimental work. We'll just do a kind of thought experiment at the moment and I'd like us to consider this particular experimental tool that we can use to investigate material properties. For the uninitiated this is called a hammer and we can with a hammer find out the sort of properties of materials and effectively essentially there are three types of material properties you can get and you will find if you investigate with a hammer. First of all we have metals. Metals have their own sort of behaviour and particularly metals have behaviour which only ever turn up in examination questions. You have to learn the words malleable and ductile when the word metal is mentioned even if you don't know what it means. So I've got a picture in here to show what it means. Malleable means that you can basically beat a piece of metal into a new shape. That's normally, I've got a picture of here, it's desirable. Of course if you drive your car into a lamppost you will discover that and it's not such a desirable effect because the metal will not just bounce back it will change its shape permanently. So we can, with the aid of a hammer or in this case a mallet we can change the shape of the metal. Ductile means metals can be drawn out into wires but we can change their shape by applying forces to them. Then we come on to another group of materials, the brittle materials represented by glasses and ceramics. So what happens if we explore the behaviour of a brittle material with the aid of our experimental tool? Well that's what happens. Nobody would try and change the shape of a bottle. Well you do change the shape of a bottle but you wouldn't try and change it in a controlled way with the aid of a hammer. So that's the behaviour of a brittle material. And finally we get on to tough. Now an example of a tough material is rubber which is probably an extreme example but what happens if you hit that with a hammer? Well you're not going to deform it. The hammer's going to bounce back. It may not actually be the safest experiment so probably a substantial risk assessment is required before you can think about doing it. But you can tell that if you hit something that's tough you're not going to fracture it. Now materials do tend to break if you load them enough but these are the broad categories of material. So our composite resin turns out to be of this general type. It's got toughness and that's going to be important for one of the things I want to go on to say when I talk about some of our future research. Now I want to go on to the second broad class of tooth coloured material, the glass ionoma cement. As I mentioned near the beginning invented by my former boss Dr Alan Wilson and fairly widely used in dentistry but not quite as widely used and not quite as satisfactory as the composite resins. They are cements and that means they're water based. They have all the appearance to the uninitiated polyfiller though they are a lot more subtle than that. They are so called self cured. That means that when you mix the components together they start to react and they turn from the paste into a solid material very quickly. So you have a powder and you mix it with a liquid. They look okay which is to say they're on the way to tooth coloured but you certainly could see the join if you tried to repair a front tooth with current glass ionoma cements and they don't have such a good translucency or quite such a good colour match. They have a very significant advantage that they adhere well to the tooth surface so they're naturally adhesive so you don't have to worry about degradation of your glues and things like that. You can get a glass ionoma into a tooth it will stay there and the disadvantage is that they are brittle. Think green wine bottles and you'll remember they break quite easily and that means that that particularly stunning repair that I show with composite resin can't be done with glass ionoma. Because the minute you bit into something hard it would fracture, it would snap into little bits and you'd have to be collecting the pieces and going back to the dentist. So they are not, they do not have the right properties for those sort of clinical applications. This is how they are presented, various ways they're presented but this is one of the ways they come in the powder. This actually contains a special reactive glass and amazingly when you make this glass if you first make it it actually looks like a piece of window glass. They have a clear sort of piece of glass but it's ground up into a very fine powder when it turns up as a white and normally we have a little bit of pigment added to that and let's say it looks tooth coloured. And we have a liquid and that liquid consists of water with normally polyacrylic acid dissolved in it and the polyacrylic acid reacts with the glass to make the cement set. And these are the ways that the cements are presented. This may not look like a precise piece of scientific equipment but this is actually a carefully metered scoop and the dentist or the dental nurse scoops out an amount of powder and then matches it with a number of drops from this bottle which has a fairly carefully engineered nozzle. And amazingly just measuring scoops and drops is sufficiently accurate, at least it's as accurate as you're going to get in a dental clinic. I always have to persuade my research students that we're not going to mix drops and scoops we're going to actually weigh everything out so that we know what we've done and we reduce at least one possible source of error. But not so bothered when it's going to go in a mouth so this is the sort of measurement technique that's used. This is a little picture to show how it's done. Our bottle of liquid held upside down, carefully metered out, counting out the drops, two drops of liquid, one scoop of powder on a mixing paper and then the whole thing is mixed.  And then this is it being mixed, I don't know how visible that is but there is a little lump in the cement being mixed with a spatula and say to all the world looks like a rather thick mix of polyfiller and that's going to go into someone's tooth. Now if you do put it in someone's tooth you can exploit the adhesion by using it for certain repairs that you can't otherwise make and these are the two glass enema repairs known in the dental professions class 5 cavities but you can see this is not a brilliant match for the tooth colour but it looks quite opaque. It will improve slightly with time because glass enemas do undergo slow maturation processes, not fully understood but there is some slow chemistry going on there that is associated with a slight change of appearance but that isn't totally atypical so you can tend to see where a glass enema has been placed. Now one of the great things about the adhesion is you can do things with it that are an asked prayer and one is you can do filling without drilling and this is the so called atraumatic restorative treatment technique. It was developed for use in the third world and in the third world the real problem as far as dentistry is concerned is you don't have a reliable source of electricity so you can't have your dental drill going. Yp I can hear you thinking. So what they have to do is different means of removing the diseased tissue so what they have developed is a series of metal scoops sort of hand held with such different shapes that enable the dentist to work out the softened tooth material. Now you can't make such a clean surface with this technique as you can with a dental drill. On the other hand I wouldn't be that bothered. I wouldn't mind seeing the end of the drill. It would be nice to be using it much more in western dentistry but it tends to have been used in third world countries so there have been a lot of clinical studies now. In places where sadly they began to get a western diet so they got McDonald's and they got Coca-Cola but somehow they haven't got toothpaste so places like Zimbabwe, parts of South America and so on have benefited from this sort of technique. If you go to an art type clinic this is a close up of a dentist working and this is a bigger clinic. You can see how they're working with this technique and there's not a drilling site so that's pretty good. So we can use glass itemers for this kind of process and that is very significant and that's been an important development in the health of developing countries. This is an art restoration so as before you can still see it. It's still not a fantastic match for the tooth but it's not bad and certainly better than amalgam would be and the fact that we can do it at all with no drilling is significant. So that's an important use of glass itemers to me. So that's a little bit about their background, how they're used, what we use them for, why we're bothering and I want to just talk a bit about some of the current research moving into future research and the two areas that are significant in my research activities are studies of their bioactivity and also improving their toughness. If we could get them from being very brittle materials to tougher materials well the dream might be that we could use them for the sort of restoration we see for the composite and we could get away from the worries about how long the composite glues are going to last. Whether we'll get there or not remains to be seen but that's certainly a theme that I'm working on. So let's think about bioactivity and I've actually talked to my wife about this slide because I said I did years of work on this iron exchange process, published four or five papers and I've got it all on one slide that we're going to brush over in 30 seconds. So I don't want to mention it to you as well just to say that we did a lot of work to show this was the case but we discover that glass itemers will release, well fluoride was known for a long time that wasn't our discovery. Although we have looked at the exchange of fluoride because in conditions of high fluoride, i.e. when you brush your teeth with a fluoride toothpaste, these cements will take up fluoride so then they go on releasing it on other occasions. But the release of these kind of irons and the conditions under which they are released, the amount that's released, the way it varies with time, the way it varies with local acidity and also the way it may change in the presence of saliva when calcium and phosphate might be taken up took up fair chunks of research time. That they are able to exchange these irons and that makes a big difference so one of the things that happens is that glass itemers that have been in saliva become much harder and if we look at their elemental composition they have obviously taken up calcium from saliva so they're dynamic in that extent. If you had been very thin layers and there's only been one study of this one report of this but it's a very important one, the whole structure develops a kind of artificial enamel. So here we have a material that could in the end not just be a totally artificial material we could end up with something that's going to be so biomimetic that in the presence of saliva is going to develop a sort of enamel. Now whether that normally happens or not I wouldn't like to say and I think probably doesn't but now that we know it's a possibility we need to look at the ability of these irons to be exchanged and to see what we can make of them. A fluoride release is very important and fluoride release in dental schools as a research topic is a cottage industry, lots of people get involved in it. We know that glass items were released fluoride for a long time and then you get this kind of study where someone's taken several different brands on the market and just plotted fluoride release. And very often the goal is to say well here's a brand this must be the best because it releases the most but they kind of rank them and do this kind of thing. I'm not overly impressed by this but there's quite a lot of this sort of thing that happens. I mean it shows what we know anyway which is that they release fluoride. Fluoride is included in the glass composition fluoride is desirable as a preventive measure for the spread of tooth decay because fluoridated tooth mineral fluoridated hydroxyl appetite is resistant to the attack of acids. So if you have some of your mineral phase lightly fluoridated then the acids can't progress at anything like the rate or indeed at all. So fluoride is desirable and the release of fluoride from a repaired cavity where there's a bit of a history of tooth decay is certainly beneficial. Some of the iron exchange may not be desirable if you put your glass item of cements into water quite early on and some of the iron is leaking out of the surface you start potentially to cause problems. I think we've only just found this in the last two or three years but the biggest thing that you can get is that the cements become weaker. We're not entirely sure why this is but Lizzie who's in the audience, my PhD student will be able to tell you in about three years time that she's finished her PhD because we're going to be looking at these iron exchange processes and ways of controlling them and trying to establish exactly what the correlation is between the extent of weakening and the change in composition that we see when these irons are released. Now we can control iron release and dentists quite like to do that. They may well coat a new newly placed glass iron with varnish and they're not trying to control iron release, they're actually trying to stop the whole thing which is water based from drying out before it sets. But controlling iron release may also ensure that you have a stronger filling and again that's something to be looked at. As I said here this is the plug for Lizzie's PhD project, we've got a new project to examine this aspect and various other aspects connected with surface properties of glass iron and this iron exchange. Now they do form their very durable bonds to teeth as a result of this iron exchange so this is definitely a good thing in the right place and if you have a filling right up against the tooth this is what you can find. This is an electron micrograph so it's a scanning electron microscope picture, very high magnification of the interface between a tooth and a cement and that cement has been in the tooth for about five years. Now that's a, and I chair the colleges ethics committee, I can say that's an unethical experiment except in the way it was done which is that after a period of time there may be need to remove teeth for example for orthodontic reasons and so you can then collect teeth that have been filled some years earlier and have a look at what's happened. And these are from, this is from some Australian researchers in the late 1990s and what they found to their surprise when they first did it was that the interface between the cement and the glass iron number develops quite a substantial structure and the other thing that was a surprise was the composition of it.  The glass iron number cement they happened to use in their study was strontium based so when they looked at this interface they discovered that the interface contains both strontium ions and calcium ions. So the strontium can only have come from the cement side and the calcium can only have come from the tooth side so there is a very slow chemical reaction that leads to a loss of distinct interface and the development of this rather thick zone and that means that these materials have extremely secure bonding they will stick in place really well. They won't leak, bacteria can't get down the signs if you've got this sort of filling and this sort of bonding. This is an important big plus for glass iron and the cement which takes us on to our big research topic. How are we going to improve the toughness of these materials because if we could do that we've got a lot of useful biological stuff that we can build into the materials and we're going to have something that really will have an enormous range of clinical uses and potentially at least popular with patients and as I say again if it coincided with the end of the dental drill that would be wonderful. So we'd like to make glass iron numbers tougher and then we will be able to extend their clinical uses and as well as extend their clinical uses we'd make them more durable because they're brittle they will suddenly break in service and they have to be replaced so both of these factors would improve if we could improve their toughness. So let's now think having seen what the experiment with a hammer would do, let's now have a look at the sort of structure that materials have that gives them their particular properties and it's clearly related somehow to their underlying atomic and molecular structure. So we'll start with metals which as we saw you can bend either round a lamp post or perhaps more satisfactorily into the shape of the trumpet and in the case of metals what we have is irons essentially floating in the sea of electrons without the electrons being bonded to any particular atom and they're free to move about in the solid that's why metals conduct electricity. It also means that if you bash one end of this piece and bend it for example into an L shape the irons over here are quite happy to move the electrons don't mind flowing round corners but freely so the whole thing will bend or be drawn out without too much difficulty. We go to something that's ceramic we now have directional bonds we have electrons that are in very tight locations and nothing there wants to move that's all held really rigidly and so when somebody comes along with a hammer well if you tap it lightly nothing happens but eventually you get to the point where a whole lot of chemical bonds break together they can't resist it anymore and they just all go so you get breaking of chemical bonds rapidly and catastrophically in a ceramic material because they are directional so why is that a problem or why is that what is the structural feature essentially that all these atoms are rigidly held in these sort of areas and they're knotty together fairly tightly and then we have rubbers well this is the best I could do for a polymer but we have rubbers where you can get some sort of flow in the case of rubbers there is some light knotting so the molecules will bounce back but tough materials in general have molecules with a fair amount of freedom that are able to flow past each other so is that what we want with glass-animas yes it probably is and it's not what we're getting at the moment so now we think about why glass-animas are brittle well we actually know why they're brittle we know that inside our setting cement we have polycrylic acid and we know that as the reaction takes place the glass leaches some ions out and these ions effectively tie the polymer chains up in knots and they have a very high density so the resulting cement is brittle and the main problem is caused by aluminium aluminium is in the glass aluminium is present and this is what aluminium likes to do when it's sitting in any sort of structure if you look at this and think what is this this is an aluminium atom and it's sitting there surrounded by six nearest neighbours and that's what aluminium really likes it wants to be in what we call six coordination and so for a long time we assumed that aluminium was coming out of the glass and it was finding atoms on the polycrylic acid chain to bond to and therefore were sitting there creating knots so we knew this from spectroscopic studies but more recently I've been involved in quite a big project using neutron beams and working at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and here's a little picture of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory because it's quite impressive you can ignore this thing up here which is the diamond light source but what we have here may not be so obvious from the picture is a little mound in which there is a controlled nuclear reaction going on and that nuclear reaction is generating neutrons and neutrons are being fired out in fact they'll be fired in all directions but there's a lot of lead shielding around here but here are two massive factory sized huts and what you do is you get yourself a week or so on the beam and the neutrons will be provided for you you turn out with your sample, you go and work in the hut some technician takes off your sample and disappears and puts it in the beam and you can sit watching completely meaningless looking numbers appear on a computer screen for the remainder of the week and eventually some poor soul of the technician takes his glowing item out of the neutron beam and I don't know where they dispose of it they must be disposing of it safely because it's pretty radioactive by then but as a result of the diffraction patterns you can get from the neutrons you can start to look at really quite intimate details of the structure and so what we've been able to find well we knew for a long time that aluminium reacted quickly but what we discovered was that those initial fixed coordinate structures that I showed were not necessarily the same as the knots some of those aluminium are surrounded by water molecules not by polycrylic acid molecules but if it's surrounded by enough water it's not a knot at all it's just sitting there so what was gradually happening was that these aluminium were losing water or whatever else was surrounding them small and turning themselves into knots and the interesting thing is that if you look at this and just look at the details of the atomic structure it turns out that the glass ornaments are really quite tough up to about 10 hours and then they go on reacting and by 24 hours they're brittle and after several months they are extremely brittle so our challenge is can we stop the setting reaction can we stop the maturation reaction at 10 hours can we arrest the setting and make them tough well that is what we're trying to do there's going to be a big project we hope we can persuade the good folk of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of which I'm a member of the research team with a process of looking at how we can arrest what I'm calling this knotting process by controlling how aluminium is able to react inside these cements if we get that then we should have a tough tooth-coloured adhesive bioactive material so that's a very substantial goal that brings me now to the end of my lecture and just very quickly I'd like to summarise glass ornaments, the materials I've been working on are widely used in modern dentistry and we've seen why, we've seen the need to repair teeth we've seen what they do and why this is desirable clearly there is scope to improve them we'd always say that as researchers but here there really is scope and there's something particularly significant because we could conceivably make very important improvements that would change the whole public perception of the visit to the dentist so what I'd say is we are trying thank you


Hey guys, welcome back to another week of What's For Dinner? My name is Andrea with Food and Mentory Adventures in Food.  So for dinner tonight, we are having grilled chicken, actually grilled chicken thighs, and this is the marinade that we used. It's new to us. I don't remember where I found this. It may have been Kroger in their ethnic section, but we normally use Walker's Wood marinade and this one was also made in Jamaica. Some of you may know that Howard is from Jamaica and whenever I see Jamaican-made products, I get them. So we're gonna be trying this out and let you nut guys know what we think about it. We are also having some sweet corn from Trader Joe's and this is what it looks like. I've already threw the bag out in the trash, but it is so good. Sweet as sugar. The best frozen corn I have ever tasted. And then we are just having some macaroni and cheese with it. I have this in the pantry. We needed to use it. Just some regular old cracker barrel. Sharp white cheddar mac and cheese. So this is what we are having for dinner tonight, and we'll see y'all next time. So for dinner tonight, I am trying out a recipe that I tried last year as well. It is bacon cheeseburger soup. So in my pot, I have one pound of lean ground beef that I sauteed with some onions. And then I seasoned it with this hamburger seasoning, and then I also used garlic powder and onion powder. To the mixture, I am getting ready to add in some cheddar cheese soup, Campbell's cheddar cheese, and cream of bacon soup. Now this is, I'm not gonna lie, this is kind of hard to find. I used to be able to find it easily at the grocery store. Now one of the only places that I've seen it is at the Dollar General. So if you don't have cream of bacon soup or can't access it, I'm sure that cream of chicken or cream of mushroom would work as well. So I've got that in there. Adding two cups of milk, and then I'm gonna add some pre-cooked bacon. And I'll make sure, of course, to leave the recipe in the description box. So I'm just adding in that bacon, oops. And I'm just gonna give this a good stir. Let it come to a simmer. And then when it does, I'm just going to add in some cheddar cheese. Okay, so here is the soup. It was quick and easy to make. And it's pretty thick. It's almost like a chowder. So it's super thick. So if you wanted a thinner soup, you definitely have to add more milk to it. It does have a good flavor. I think I'm gonna play around with this a little bit more to kind of get the taste that I'm looking for. But it's not bad. It really isn't bad and it's quick and easy to make. So this is what we're having for dinner tonight. And we'll see you guys next time. Okay, so today I'm trying out a recipe that I did try. I guess it's been a couple of months ago. And last time I made it, I said I was gonna make some changes to it. It's a sausage rice skillet. So in my skillet, I have one pound of hot breakfast sausage that I've already cooked. And to it, I'm going to add one package of the Lipton noodle soup, and then also one cup of Jasmine rice. So last time I made it, I thought there was way too much rice in it. It kind of took away the flavor. So the next time I said that I made it, I was going to add half the amount of rice and half the amount of liquid. So I am only adding, like I said, one cup of rice and then two cups of water. The original recipe was four cups of water and two cups of rice. I think if you do decide to stick with the original recipe, then I would double the amount of meat that you put in this dish. So I'm going to stir this up really well. And then I'm going to cover it and let it cook for about 20 minutes or so or until the rice is done. Okay, so here it is and I like it a lot better with less rice and less water. So I'll link the original recipe in the description box and I'll just include a note about, you know, how I did it a little bit differently, but it's really, really, really flavorful. With it, I'm just serving some canned green beans and I had some frozen chopped onion that I added to them, garlic powder, onion powder, and a little bit of seasoning salt. So this is what we're having for dinner tonight and we'll see y'all next time. Hey guys, so for dinner tonight, Howard and I are having a date night. There is no Harrison. We went to a Chinese buffet. So this is Howard's plate. This is round one. He's got a bunch of stuff on there. I can't even name it all. And then he is trying some spicy fish soup. And then this is my plate. I got a bunch of stuff too. And then I have some hot and sour soup. So Chinese buffet is what's for dinner tonight. So for dinner tonight, we are eating from our freezer. Howard grilled some pork steaks for us and here they are. And then I made some fried rice and green beans. So this is a fried rice seasoning that I used right here. And I just follow the directions on the package. I add bacon, a green onion. You name it. I add it whatever it says there. And then these are the green beans that I use there from Stader Joe's. This is a 16 oh actually 24 ounce bag. And I use half a bag of green beans to make our dinners. So this is what we're having for dinner tonight and we'll see y'all next time.