In healthy bones, the glue contains springs of some sort that uncoil when the bone is stressed, which helps absorb shock.

New study of human bones reveals microscopic shock absorbers that hold healthy bones together under stress and help repair minor cracks, LiveSience reported.
The work could point to new therapies to reduce the effects of aging on bones and help fix broken bones.
The process, researchers said today, is the same as one they'd found previously in abalone shells, known to be among the toughest natural material possible.
Inside your bones are mineralized collagen fibrils, which are held together by an adhesive. That much was known.
In healthy bones, the glue contain springs of some sort that uncoil when the bone is stressed, which helps absorb shock, the scientists found in some of the highest-resolution images ever made of bones.
When the stress is over, the springs recoil back to normal.
The newfound mechanism gives young, healthy bone tremendous resiliency and resistance to fracture, the scientists say. It also helps heal small cracks.
"The findings may lead to therapy for bone fracture, or even to prevention," said Georg Fanter, the study's lead researcher and a doctoral student in physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"What we found is that there is a glue in bone that holds these mineralized collagen fibrils together, and this glue works along the same principles that our interdisciplinary research group found in abalone shells," said professor Paul Hansma, in whose lab the work was done. "This glue involves sacrificial bonds (with hidden length) that uncoil when the bone is stressed."
Now that exact molecules have been identified with this mechanism, the researchers say, new diet or drug therapies can be designed for conditions such as osteoporosis, which is a severe deterioration of bone strength. Mineral density in human bones peaks around age 30 for all of us and declines through old age.

A new technique for detecting dangerous pathogens could lead to faster and cheaper diagnosis of disease and prevent food poisoning, say US researchers, newscientist.com reported.
The team claims their biosensor is accurate enough to identify different strains of disease-causing organisms in a blood sample in just 30 minutes, and at a fraction of the current cost.
The researchers hope the test could soon be incorporated into an inexpensive hand-held device for use in the field and in the developing world.
Current biosensors rely on a costly and time-consuming technique called gene amplification, which involves taking a piece of DNA from the sample and adding enzymes to make enough copies to allow the pathogen to be detected. It can take up to 48 hours for a positive result.
By contrast, the new process exploits a natural matching technique. A sample of the pathogen-containing material to be tested--blood or food, for example--is placed in a test tube and heated in the presence of an enzyme to break down the cells and release their genetic material. Then a dipstick is placed into the mixture and left for a few minutes.
Like in a pregnancy test, if a red line appears, the particular pathogen is present. The process takes just half an hour from start to finish.

UCLA chemists have created the first nano valve that can be opened and closed at will to trap and release molecules, according to brightsurf.com.
ÒThis paper demonstrates unequivocally that the machine works,Ó said Jeffrey I. Zink, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, and a member of the research team.
"A nano valve potentially could be used as a drug delivery system," Zink said.
"The valve is like a mechanical system that we can control like a water faucet," said UCLA graduate student Thoi Nguyen, lead author on the paper.
This nano valve consists of moving parts--switchable rotaxane molecules that resemble linear motors designed by California NanoSystems Institute director Fraser StoddartÕs team--attached to a tiny piece of glass (porous silica), which measures about 500 nanometers, and which Nguyen is currently reducing in size. Tiny pores in the glass are only a few nanometers in size.
The valve is uniquely designed so one end attaches to the opening of the hole that will be blocked and unblocked, and the other end has the switchable rotaxanes whose movable component blocks the hole in the down position and leaves it open in the up position. The researchers used chemical energy involving a single electron as the power supply to open and shut the valve, and a luminescent molecule that allows them to tell from emitted light whether a molecule is trapped or has been released.
Switchable rotaxanes are molecules composed of a dumbbell component with two stations between which a ring component can be made to move back and forth in a linear fashion.

Scientists seeking a simple solution to the tricky task of separating single cells from a herd of others have found a way of making light of the problem, cnn.com reported.
The new technique dubbed the "optoelectronic tweezer" combines a relatively low intensity light source with photo electricity to allow scientists to literally corral the cells they want to study, and could have major medical implications.
"Our design has a strong practical advantage in that, unlike optical tweezers, a simple light source such as a light-emitting diode ... is powerful enough," said Pei Yu Chiou, part of the team led by Ming Wu at the University of California, Berkeley.
The new technique, reported in the science journal Nature, could be used to quickly isolate and study foetal cells in a mother's blood sample or separate abnormally shaped organisms from healthy ones.
As opposed to optical tweezers which use laser beams to round up cells, the low intensity light source which uses 100,000 times less power than that needed for a lazer makes sure there is no risk of damage to neighboring cells.