#ossio

Tell me if this sounds like magic. A surgeon can put a screw in your broken bone, and two years later you can X-ray that exact same spot and find no screw there. Just bone.

Before you ask, no, it wasn't removed and it didn't fall out, and nobody took it out. Your own bone slowly grew into it and replaced it, until one day there was nothing left but you.

And it's made of glass. Actual glass. An Israeli company called OSSIO figured out how to spin the stuff into fibers so close to what your bones are already built from that your body doesn't fight it, it just grows into the thing and takes it over.

That matters, because the usual way to fix a bad break is to bolt it with metal that never leaves. That's the screw somebody's still setting off airport scanners with twenty years later, the one that aches every time it's cold, the one a kid has to get wheeled back into surgery just to have taken out, because his bones keep growing and the metal won't. This just skips all of that. It holds the break, it's stronger than the bone itself, and then it bows out.

It's not stuck in a lab somewhere, either. Close to 100,000 are already in real people, the FDA cleared it back in 2019, and this summer it started showing up in children's hospitals all over the country, cleared for kids as young as two.

If it were my kid on that table, I wouldn't want the screw he'd still be beeping through airport security with at 40. I'd want the one that disappears.