New Plastic Helps Mend Broken Bones
livescience.com
A new type of plastic someday could make fixing broken bones a snap.
Richard Oreffo, a professor of Musculoskeletal Science at the University of Southamptonin England, and colleagues have created a blend of three plastics that is tough yet highly porous. This may make it an ideal “scaffold” for a broken bone – a placeholder structure that can be replaced with real bone tissue as the body heals.
The polymer “has this lovely honeycomb structure,” Oreffo said. That allows living cells to “crawl all over it. Blood vessels can penetrate it. So it’s really nice.”
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Generating electricity from viruses as you walk
The generator produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.
Their generator is the first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material. Piezoelectricity is the accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to mechanical stress.
