A year ago, Corning published a promotional video, “A Day Made of Glass… Made possible by Corning” that provide an intriguing peek into some of the technologies the company is considering—and how it may affect our lifestyles. It proved to be a popular video, racking up well over 17 million views as of today.

As those of us old enough to remember Walt Disney’s movies about the future of communities, transportation and space, these visionary presentations are more informed guesswork than prophecy. Sometimes (most times?) these ideas just don’t work out for a number of reasons, but the exercise of compiling and publishing these visions helps bring excitement and motivation, especially to young people contemplating careers in science and engineering.

However, smart tech-oriented companies tend to be cautious about sharing their “visions” with the public (Steve Jobs was and Apple still is among those at the most secretive end of the spectrum) because they are both concerned about tipping their hand to competitors and, well, being embarrassed by being wrong about the future.

Corning, however, seems to be closer to the other end of the spectrum and has clearly decided that there is value in teasing the public with how high-tech glass products may disrupt a lot of technologies in our future. Now today, nearly on the anniversary of its first “A Day Made of Glass” video, the company has published an update,  ”A Day Made of Glass, Part 2″ that fleshes out more of Corning’s vision and also incorporates some of the market trends over the last year, such as the huge success of the iPad.

Some of the concepts illustrated in the new video include durable, multitouch screens; colossal- and large-scale edge-to-edge displays; ubiquitous electrochromic windows; entire dashboard surfaces made of soft, flexible glass displays; lightweight auto and sunroof glass; designer-friendly photovoltaic units; antimicrobial glass services for medical applications; and even advances in glass fiber optics.

Corning admits that a lot of these products aren’t right around the corner and acknowledges that there is still a lot of RD&D work that is needed to address existing problems with scalability and price.

To be clear, Corning is smart enough not to reveal all of its product and technology bets in this video. Furthermore, the Apple/Gorilla Glass story underlines how even Corning and other top-tier companies cannot always anticipate what external disruptions of the marketplace will rock their corporate world. Nevertheless, ADMOG Part 2 is an fascinating vision and I predict the number of views in the next year will easily exceed the 17 million of Part 1.

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Rediheal borate glass fibers are successfully being used to treat injured green sea turtles and other animals. Credit: Avalon Medical Ltd.

One topic I and other ACerS staff frequently get asked about relates to a story from last April about the special healing borate-based glass fiber pads developed by glass scientists Delbert Day and Steve Jung in conjunction with MoSci Corp., a Rolla, Mo.-based glass products company. The news last year was that the glass fiber product, dubbed DermaFuse by MoSci, helped speed the healing of venous stasis ulcers in a majority of patients enrolled in a small human clinical test group of adult diabetics supervised by the internal review board of the Phelps County Regional Medical Center.

Most of the inquiries that come to me are from people who either are suffering with hard-to-heal skin ulcers or sores themselves or are reaching out to me on behalf of friends or family members who have the condition. Their questions are all pretty much along the lines of, “How can I or my doctors get my/their hands on DermaFuse?”

Up until just recently, I had to disappoint a lot of people because MoSci mainly does the R&D for glass products, and then licenses or reaches a supply agreement with third-party commercial companies and institutions, which then shepherd the products through regulatory processes and handle marketing and distribution. And, from what I understand, there are still testing, certification and agreements with distributors that need to be completed before it is authorized for human use.

However, the significant news is that Avalon Medical Ltd. has arranged for the DermaFuse material to be classified as “veterinary medical device” and is now marketing the product under the Rediheal brand to the veterinary and animal care marketplace.

According to the Rediheal website, the company is making the product for various size animals (”Equine version now available”) and is also offering a putty-like version of the product that can be shaped for bone healing.

While the story I originally wrote focused on a case study of human patients with venous stasis ulcers, it appears that Dermifuse/Rediheal material works shockingly well on many types of wounds. For example, the Rediheal website has several amazing animal case studies including large and small lacerations, dental void packing and gunshot wounds. (Warning - photos are not for the squeamish!)

In regard the gunshot wound case, a dog sustained at 42-square-inch wound in its back that was treated with Rediheal. According the company, the wound shrunk rapidly, and 40 days later it was nearly healed.

For me, one of the most jarring things about the gunshot wound is that there appears to be almost no scarring (see for yourself), and the dog’s fur seems to have completely regrown (albeit in a lighter color).

More information and case studies are on a special Rediheal/Avalon Facebook page, including successful efforts to heal injured green sea turtles at Jekyll Island, Ga.

One final note: Day and Jung (along with Mohamed N. Rahaman, B. Sonny Bal, Qiang Fu, Lynda F. Bonewald and Antoni P. Tomsia) also published a paper on this topic last summer in Acta Biomaterialia (doi:10.1016/j.actbio.2011.03.016), titled “Bioactive glass in tissue engineering.”

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Check ‘em out:

Warning on fracture of the alumina-bearing couple delta ceramic liner in hip implants

Although the fracture rate of third-generation alumina-bearing couples is low, we believe that it may not be possible to eliminate the actual risk of alumina head fracture. Patients should be informed about the potential for this complication before receiving an alumina-bearing couple.

Polymer nanocomposites drive opportunities in the automotive sector

Polymer nanocomposites represent a new class of multiphase materials containing dispersion of nano-sized filler materials such as nanoparticles, nanoclays, nanotubes, nanofibers etc. within the polymer matrices. These multifunctional nanocomposites exhibit excellent mechanical properties, but also display an outstanding combination of optical, electrical, thermal, magnetic and other physico-chemical properties. It is believed that the molecular level interactions between the nanoparticles and polymer matrices along with the presence of very high nanoparticle-polymer interfacial area play a major role in influencing the physical and mechanical properties of nanocomposites.

Magnetic memory miniaturized to just 12 atoms

The smallest magnetic-memory bit ever made-an aggregation of just 12 iron atoms created by researchers at IBM-shows the ultimate limits of future data-storage systems. The magnetic memory elements don’t work in the same way that today’s hard drives work, and, in theory, they can be much smaller without becoming unstable. As the semiconductor industry bumps up against the limits of scaling by making memory and computation devices ever smaller, the IBM Almaden research group, led by Andreas Heinrich, is working from the other end, building computing elements atom-by-atom in the lab. Data-storage arrays made from these atomic bits would be about 100 times denser than anything that can be built today.

The solar shakeout, and what to expect in 2012

With bankruptcies an unwanted but increasingly common feature of the photovoltaic landscape, questions abound as to what to expect from 2012. Lux Research’s Matt Feinstein investigates and picks a list of winners from the up and downstream markets. Innovation it seems, and not just when it comes to technology, is the key

New thermal diodes: Jumping droplets take a lot of heat, as long as it comes in a cool way

Microscopic water droplets jumping between surfaces that repel and attract moisture could hold the key to a wide array of more energy efficient products, ranging from large solar panels to compact laptop computers. Duke University engineers have developed a new way of producing thermal diodes, devices which regulate heat to preferentially flow in a certain direction, effectively creating a thermal conductor in the forward direction and an insulator in the reverse direction.

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Ormosil particles in axons of fruit fly neurons appear as bright red spots. Even after long-term exposure, the cells and the flies themselves remain unharmed. (Credit: Shermali Gunawardena; PLoS One).

Medical researchers and materials scientists have been collaborating in many places to develop novel micro-targeted drug delivery systems, often with multiple functions in mind. For example, an ideal material would be able to serve as “mule” for a therapeutic drug, be tracked in the body and be able to release the drug at times and locations determined by a physician. Materials in the world of ceramic and glass are of keen interest to these researchers because they can be made to be inert and mirror materials already found in humans and animals.

Indeed, various groups are testing drug and imaging systems based on glass microbeads, nanodiamonds and mesoporous silica. Another similar material is Ormosil, or organically modified silica. Each of these can be combined with a variety of fluorophores for imaging and tracking purposes. The pores, cavities and surfaces of these materials permit bioactive molecules such as enzymes, genetic materials and chemotherapeutic drugs to be incorporated into them. So far, in many cases in vitro testing of these has been encouraging and many are slowing working their way towards in vivo applications.

As in vivo testing approaches, the issue of how truly biocompatible these materials are becomes more important. Along these lines, a group out of the University of Buffalo investigating treatments for neurodegenerative disorders has been testing Ormosil nanoparticles in fruit flies, and in a new paper they report that even after long-term exposure to Ormosil, cells harvested from throughout the Drosophila show no harm from the material. Besides biocompatibility, their work also indicates that the “Ormosil nanoparticles penetrate into living brains, neuronal cell bodies and axonal projections. … Strikingly, incorporation of ORMOSIL nanoparticles into the [Drosophila] brain did not induce aberrant neuronal death or interfere with normal neuronal processes.”

One of the UB researchers, Shermali Gunawardena, reports in a news release, “We saw that after feeding these nanoparticles in the fruit fly larvae, the ORMOSIL was going mainly into the guts and skin. But over time, in adult flies, you could see it in the brain. These results are really fascinating because these particles do not show any toxic effects on the whole organism or the neuronal cells.”

Gunawardena works alongside Paras N. Prasad in the school’s Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics. Prasad, who heads the ILPB, designed the Ormosil particles to have cavities that can be filled with a therapeutic drug that can be released when exposed to a specific light source. Gunawardena’s expertise is diseases that appear to be caused by problems arising in the chemical transportation systems found in neurons, such as the ones responsible for shuttling key proteins. There is evidence of a link to Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s and other diseases when the transportation system falters and proteins accumulate. She hopes to use these nanoparticles to target drugs to protein jams, breaking up the accumulations.

In their paper published in PLoS ONE (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029424), Gunawardena, Prasad et al. are clearly optimistic. They say

“[O]ur study demonstrates that Ormosil nanoparticles have great promise for the development of therapeutic applications for human neuronal disease for long-term use within whole organisms. Its nontoxic characteristic and its ability to readily incorporate into living neuronal tissues together with its porous surface that allows incorporation of specific molecules for targeting, make Ormosil nanoparticles the next generation of particles that can be effectively used to develop targeted therapeutic treatments to specific areas of the brain or to specific populations of neurons. Development of such treatment strategies have great potential in minimizing global deleterious affects while maximizing beneficial affects, which is a problem in many of the current treatment strategies that are used for many human neuronal diseases.”

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Making glass-ceramics at Jena University. Credit: Jan-Peter Kasper, FSU.

James Bond fans know well the villain Jaws, a character in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. Jaws wasn’t concerned about appearance as long as his powerful steel teeth could be sunk into a foe.

But, finding strong and natural-appearing materials for artificial teeth for use in bridges and dentures is a big concern for dentistry professionals, and a group from the Otto Schott Institute for Glass Chemistry at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany) think their new nanocrystal-based approach to glass-ceramic dental materials provides a superior solution.

Glass–ceramic materials have been known for decades as a way for engineers and researchers to combine the best of possible characteristics of the glass and ceramic worlds. The general process used is to carefully controlling the growth of crystals during the reheating of glass, which is typically seeded with nucleating additives. The degree of crystallization is controlled through the heating process and can range from partial to full crystallization. The most familiar glass–ceramic application probably is the ubiquitous translucent “glass” stovetop that provides a glass-like appearance while retaining the strength and thermodynamic properties of a ceramic.

The Jena group, led by Christian Rüssel, a professor at the university, recently experimented with glass–ceramic materials based on magnesium-, aluminum- and silicon oxide to achieve a high-strength product. They also used different concentrations of zirconia as a nucleating agent. They also experimented with doping some of the compositions with ZnO or P₂O₅.

In a news release from the school, Rüssel reports, “We achieve a strength five-times higher than with comparable denture ceramics available today.”

They say their first step was to melt the starting materials around 1,500°C. The glass is cooled and finely ground. They then melted and cooled it again. Finally, nanocrystals are generated by controlled heating to about 1,000°C. “This procedure determines the crystallization crucial for the strength of the product,” Rüssel explains.

Rüssel’s group found that by varying the amount of zirconia, they could create colorless glass–ceramics that ranged from transparent to opaque. Thus, the materials could be fine-tuned to display some of the partial translucency of the natural enamel in teeth. The size of the formed nanocrystals is apparently key. Rüssel says the nanocrystals are too small to strongly disperse light, and thus can appear translucent.

As far as strength goes, a paper by Rüssel et al. published in Journal of Biomedical Materials Research (doi:10.1002/jbm.b.31972) reports that they obtained a bending strength of 475 MPa by annealing the material at 1,000°C for three hours. They also obtained a microhardness up to 13.3 GPa and of the fracture toughness up to 2.7 MPa m^1/2.

The Jena glass chemists didn’t start off looking for new dental materials. In fact, the dental idea sprang up while they were working on high-density ceramics for applications in other fields, such as materials for higher efficiency computer hard drives. Once Rüssel and the others began to understand some of the optical characteristics of some of the materials they were testing, they realized, according to Rüssel, that “an additional field of application is opening up for these materials in dentistry.”

007 trivia experts may remember that Jaws turned from bad guy to James Bond ally in Moonraker, and even fell in love. Too bad for Jaws that the Jena glass-ceramics weren’t around to allow the writers to create a more attractive happy ending for him and his bride-to-be.

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Editor’s note: I have been absent from these pages for many weeks due to an unexpected medical problem.

I am on the mend now and making daily progress. Many thanks go to Eileen De Guire and others on the ACerS staff who are helping with the posting and editing until I am back to 100%.

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