Sticks and stones may break your bones… but there’s a fix for that: Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed a “bone bandage” that has regenerated hurt bones in mice and shows promise of doing the same for humans, according to Interesting Engineering. Structured as a freestanding scaffold, when injected into mice with bone defects in their skulls and left for six weeks, bone regeneration was enhanced significantly with no observed side effects.

The next step is to adapt it to humans. So far, the scientists have only experimented on mice, but the results are considered a significant breakthrough for regenerative medicine which can be applied to bone regeneration in humans and various other regenerative applications, says the study published in the ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces journal.

How does it work? The “scaffold” is composed of piezoelectric materials, which release an electric charge triggered by stress to aid in bone repair, and a mineral called hydroxyapatite (HAp) that promotes growth and is naturally found in bones. It was already known that piezoelectric materials helped bone repair, but combined with HAp, cell attachment was 10-15% higher and cell growth was 20-30% higher. The HAp scaffolds yielded 30-40% higher bone formation as well.

We might be getting a unified messaging platform to cut through the litany of apps:Meta-owned WhatsApp is working on integrating other messaging apps and allowing users to message across different apps (think using iMessage to send a WhatsApp message) without violating privacy and security or jeopardizing WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, Wired reports.

Part of the impetus comes from European regulations, which nudged Meta to allow for interoperability on WhatsApp by designating Meta as a significant digital entity under its Digital Markets Act last September. Thus far, the integration would allow apps to “plug in” to each other, and would only apply to messaging, with European regulations only requiring similar interoperability for calls and group chats in the future.

The big question remains how to protect privacy and security while integrating the new features: Requiring different apps to conform to each other’s privacy standards and networks opens them up to a world of possibilities in terms of the infrastructure used, and no clear guidelines on which companies will have the upper hand in enforcing their preferred methods. Some are also questioning how integrating messaging across apps will affect how people are “found” on different platforms. While WhatsApp is connected to phone numbers, iMessage can operate on phone numbers or iCloud emails, and Swiss app Threema gives each account a randomized eight-digit ID (does this remind anyone of BBM?). “Linking up with WhatsApp ‘could deanonymize Threema users,’” Threema spokesperson Julia Weis told Wired.

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