A guided walk through the world of mesoporous bioactive glasses (MBGs): Fundamentals, processing, and applications

Bioactive glasses (BGs) are traditionally known to be able to bond to living bone and stimulate bone regeneration. The production of such materials in a mesoporous form allowed scientists to dramatically expand the versatility of oxide-based glass systems as well as their applications in biomedicine. These nanostructured materials, called mesoporous bioactive glasses (MBGs), not only exhibit an ultrafast mineralization rate but can be used as vehicles for the sustained delivery of drugs, which are hosted inside the mesopores, and therapeutic ions, which are released during material dissolution in contact with biological fluids. This review paper summarizes the main strategies for the preparation of MBGs, as well as their properties and applications in the biomedical field, with an emphasis on the methodological aspects and the promise of hierarchical systems with multiscale porosity

Comparison between bioactive sol-gel and melt-derived glasses/glass-ceramics based on the multicomponent SiO2-P2O5-CaO-MgO-Na2O-K2O System

Bioactive sol-gel glasses are attractive biomaterials from both technological and functional viewpoints as they require lower processing temperatures compared to their melt-derived counterparts and exhibit a high specific surface area due to inherent nanoporosity. However, most of these materials are based on relatively simple binary or ternary oxide systems since the synthesis of multicomponent glasses via sol-gel still is a challenge. This work reports for the first time the production and characterization of sol-gel materials based on a six-oxide basic system (SiO2-P2O5-CaO-MgO-Na2O-K2O). It was shown that calcination played a role in inducing the formation of crystalline phases, thus generating glass-ceramic materials. The thermal, microstructural and textural properties, as well as the in vitro bioactivity, of these sol-gel materials were assessed and compared to those of the melt-derived counterpart glass with the same nominal composition. In spite of their glass-ceramic nature, these materials retained an excellent apatite-forming ability, which is key in bone repair applications

Underwater Laboratories for Astroparticle Physics and Deep Sea Science

The exploration of deep sea environments is presently at the dawn of a new era: underwater laboratories, permanently installed on the sea floor and offering power and on-line data transmission links to the shore, will allow to continuously monitor oceanographical properties. An important boost in this direction has been provided by the high energy physics scientific community, that aims at the realization of an underwater detector for cosmic high energy neutrinos. Neutrinos are considered a very promising probe for high energy astrophysics and many indications suggest that some of the most energetic sources known in the universe could also be high energy neutrino sources. The expected neutrino fluxes indicate that a km3-scale detector must be realised to achieve this ambitious aim. The quest for the realization of such a detector in the Mediterranean Sea has already started

Strong enhancement of extremely energetic proton production in central heavy ion collisions at intermediate energy

The energetic proton emission has been investigated as a function of the reaction centrality for the system 58Ni + 58Ni at 30A MeV. Extremely energetic protons (EpNN > 130 MeV) were measured and their multiplicity is found to increase almost quadratically with the number of participant nucleons thus indicating the onset of a mechanism beyond one and two-body dynamics.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letter

Detection potential to point-like neutrino sources with the NEMO-km3 telescope

The NEMO Collaboration is conducting an R&D activity towards the construction of a Mediterranean km3 neutrino telescope. In this work, we present the results of Monte Carlo simulation studies on the capability of the proposed NEMO telescope to detect and identify point-like sources of high energy muon neutrinos.Comment: To be published on BCN06 proceedings (Barcelona, July 4-7, 2006

High-Energy Neutrino Astronomy

Kilometer-scale neutrino detectors such as IceCube are discovery instruments covering nuclear and particle physics, cosmology and astronomy. Examples of their multidisciplinary missions include the search for the particle nature of dark matter and for additional small dimensions of space. In the end, their conceptual design is very much anchored to the observational fact that Nature accelerates protons and photons to energies in excess of $10^{20}$ and $10^{13}$ eV, respectively. The cosmic ray connection sets the scale of cosmic neutrino fluxes. In this context, we discuss the first results of the completed AMANDA detector and the reach of its extension, IceCube. Similar experiments are under construction in the Mediterranean. Neutrino astronomy is also expanding in new directions with efforts to detect air showers, acoustic and radio signals initiated by super-EeV neutrinos.Comment: 9 pages, Latex2e, uses ws-procs975x65standard.sty (included), 4 postscript figures. To appear in Proceedings of Thinking, Observing, and Mining the Universe, Sorrento, Italy, September 200