Never mind stitches—it is possible to solder wounds closed
It works exactly the same way that soldering electronics does
IF YOU CUT yourself, your options are to reach for a plaster or, if the cut is nasty, to go to a doctor to have it stitched or glued. That seems a rather limited choice. Medical researchers have been trying to develop another way to join the edges of a wound, inspired by something routinely done to gas pipes and electronics: soldering. And an innovation developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, in co-operation with the Swiss materials-science institute Empa, suggests this might soon become a practical reality.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Heat treatment”
From the April 16th 2022 edition
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