by Emma Pewsey (University of Cambridge, UK) Winner of Access to Understanding 2013 X-rays can now be used not only to show where bones have fractured, but also to investigate why these bones break in the first place. Results suggest the possibility of preventing the trauma of thousands of broken hips using drugs already commonly used for treating osteoporosis. Normal healthy bones can be thought of as nature’s scaffold poles.

By Emma Pewsey, Department of Materials Science, University of Cambridge. I’m a relative newcomer to biosciences – at school, physics and chemistry were more my thing. However, starting a PhD on the corrosion of metal implants in the human body meant I needed to brush up on my biology. It was time to hit the medical journals. It was easy enough to find papers. However, it was much harder to determine whether they were relevant.