Rapid technological development leads to the new generation of well-known materials like glass. It is everywhere, windows, cups, electronics, decorative household elements, windshields, aircraft, jewelry, and much more.

There are many glass types, but one of them ranks as the future leader in the materials market. It is a bioactive glass, which revolutionized regenerative medicine. In this article, we explain what bioactive glass is and what makes it so unusual.

Figure 1. The scheme of the bone reconstruction prosses using bioactive glass. Image Credit: M. Osial

Revolution in bone regeneration discipline

In 1969 Larry Hench and his team discovered bioactive

‘LeSoleil’, a naturally active compound, was discovered as a therapeutic candidate for use against COVID-19. As the new coronavirus began to spread globally, Suntrap Life Technologies Ltd established a special research team.

The project, “Research on Anti-New Coronavirus (COVID-19) Prevention Products”, was launched in an emergency situation. Working from the naturally active compounds screening and discovery platform developed by the International Drug Discovery Network Unites (IDDNU)*, the Suntrap research team conducted high throughput virtual screening of all naturally active compounds in the library, aiming to isolate compounds with a potent antiviral activity while ensuring safety.

Image credit: Pixabay (Free

In the joint CORSA project, SARS-CoV-2 and further respiratory viruses on surfaces and skin are to be inactivatedby using UVC light. The project team is developing special UVC LEDs for this purpose and is investigating parameters such as wavelengths, irra-diation doses and virus habitats.

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is supporting the three-year project from 2021 with a total of three million euros.

This prototype with UVC-LEDs was designed specifically to disinfect everyday objects. 128 LEDs irradiate the object on a UV-transparent pane from above and below. Image credit: FBH/P. Immerz

Like bacteria and fungi, viruses can

In order to ensure safety in autonomous driving, it is necessary to perform object detection in real-time. Nevertheless, GPUs used in self-driving cars have to be cheap and power-efficient. It makes currently used object detection techniques incapable of performing this task.

Image credit: pxhere, CC0 Public Domain

A recent paper suggests combining network enhancement and pruning search with reinforcement learning. That way, the framework automatically generates unified schemes of network enhancement and pruning. The performance of models generated under the schemes is then fed back to the generator.

The system is flexible and can be customized down to the

A new paper recently published in the international journal Energies explores the energy-related, technological, and consumption patterns necessary to achieve a sustainable future on this planet in a way that benefits everyone – human and otherwise.

Rather than portraying the current lack of sustainability as a function of the uptake of carbon emissions, the paper introduces a “Renewable Energy Equivalent Footprint” (REEF) which “depicts a hypothetical world in which the electricity and fuel demands are met entirely from renewable energy”.

The paper lays out how powering our civilisation in such a manner would require a large-scale electrification of the current

When surgeons remove cancer, one of the first questions is, “Did they get it all?” Researchers from Rice University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have created a new microscope that can quickly and inexpensively image large tissue sections, potentially during surgery, to find the answer.

The microscope can rapidly image relatively thick pieces of tissue with cellular resolution and could allow surgeons to inspect the margins of tumors within minutes of their removal. It was created by engineers and applied physicists at Rice and is described in a study published in the Proceedings of the National