An elderly woman is the recipient of the first-ever three dimensional (3-D) printed jawbone, made of titanium powder that was sintered together one layer at a time.  It restored the recipient’s facial esthetics and allowed her to regain her speech within hours.  It could pave the way for a new wave of 3-D printed body parts — maybe not yet full organs, but certainly bones or joints.  [ASM Medical Materials eNewsletter, 10 May 2012]

Osteophilic modular nanostructured multilayers containing hydroxyapatite nanoparticles complexed with a natural polymer chitosan create an osteoconductive surface for mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs).  Coupled with the sustained release of physiological amounts of osteoinductive bone morphogenetic protein over several days from degradable poly(β-amino ester) based multilayers, this single coating results in a synergistic accelerated and upregulated differentiation of MSCs into osteoblasts laying down new bone tissue on orthopedic implants.  [Advanced Materials, 15 Mar 2012]

Incorporating active materials within fibers holds great promise for tunable, non-woven, optoelectronic textiles that can respond to external stimuli.  Previous studies have shown that light can be confined by infiltrating the microstructures with liquid crystal (LC) materials.  However, these fibers are mostly silica-based, and the LC material has generally been capillary-filled, limiting the length and flexibility of the photonic fibers.  We produced and characterized thermally and electro-optically responsive microfibers endowed with LC properties.  [SPIE Newsroom, 1 May 2012]

Transparent conductors based on few-layer graphene (FLG) intercalated with ferric chloride (FeCl3) have an outstandingly low sheet resistance and high optical transparency.  FeCl3-FLGs outperform the current limit of transparent conductors such as indium tin oxide, carbon-nanotube films, and doped graphene materials.  This makes FeCl3-FLG materials the best transparent conductors for optoelectronic devices.  [Advanced Materials, 25 Apr 2012]

Construction management experts at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering have developed a system that employs remote sensing technology to improve safety on construction sites by using tracking tags to monitor movements in real-time.  Knowing the precise location of people, equipment and building materials will reduce accidents and could also help prevent materials from being placed too close to edges where they could fall.  [University of Calgary News Release, 27 Apr 2012]

Robots need help navigating their surroundings and sophisticated location systems to keep track of their position.  Now the same technologies are being adapted to help blind people navigate indoor and outdoor spaces independently.  One such system, being developed by the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, consists of a pair of glasses equipped with cameras and sensors like those used in robot exploration.  [New Scientist, 28 Apr 2012]

The image fractal analysis is actively used in all science branches. In particular in materials science the fractal analysis is applied to study microstructure of deformed metals because its structure can be interpreted as the fractal image.  It is well known that such images can be described by fractal dimension.  In this paper, the fractal dimension change for different kinds of metals in the processes of severe plastic deformation (SPD) is explored.  It is shown that for the undeformed metals the stochastic network of structural elements boundaries has the fractal dimension Db=1.60\pm 0.03.  The SPD leads to increasing the fractal dimension up to D=1.80\pm 0.03.  Possible reasons of changes in fractal dimension of metals structures in the SPD processes are analyzed.  [arXiv.org, 28 Apr 2012]

We study the structural and dynamical mechanisms of reinforcement of a polymer nanocomposite (PNC) via coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations.  In a regime of strong polymer-filler interactions, the stress at failure of the PNC is clearly correlated to structural quantities, such as the filler loading, the surface area of the polymer-filler interface, and the network structure.  Additionally, we find that small fillers, of the size of the polymer monomers, are the most effective at reinforcing the matrix by surrounding the polymer chains and maximizing the number of strong polymer-filler interactions.  Such a structural configuration is correlated to a dynamical feature, namely, the minimization of the relative mobility of the fillers with respect to the polymer matrix.  [arXiv.org, 26 Apr 2012]

Optical clocks show unprecedented accuracy, surpassing that of previously available clock systems by more than one order of magnitude.  Precise intercomparisons will enable a variety of experiments, including tests of fundamental quantum physics and cosmology and applications in geodesy and navigation.  Well-established, satellite-based techniques for microwave dissemination are not adequate to compare optical clocks.  Here, we present phase-stabilized distribution of an optical frequency over 920 kilometers of telecommunication fiber.  We used two antiparallel fiber links to determine their fractional frequency instability to 5 × 10−15 in a 1-second integration time, reaching 10−18 in less than 1000 seconds.  For long integration times τ, the deviation from the expected frequency value has been constrained to within 4 × 10−19.  The link may serve as part of a Europe-wide optical frequency dissemination network.  [Science, 27 Apr 2012]

The photovoltaic industry routinely uses infrared furnaces to make solar cells from a thin wafer of silicon.  Although modern furnaces can handle high throughput, they are typically not energy efficient.  Generally, they produce a uniform energy flux over the wafers, but the wafer edges radiate more heat than their centers, and so the resulting temperature is not uniform throughout the wafer.  This results in compromised performance: for example, a large-area solar cell’s edges will have poor electrical performance and degrade its overall output power.  To rectify this, we have developed an optical cavity furnace as a single-wafer processing system, akin to a rapid thermal processing system.  [SPIE Newsroom, 19 Apr 2012]