You're right - for a product to be considered "absorbable" or "degradable" in patient care, the product has to eventually break down to compounds that the body naturally metabolizes. Classic example: Vicryl (tm), polyglactin 910 (90% glycolide/10% lactide polymer) suture. Water causes it to break down into glycolic acid and lactic acid, usually over the course of 56 days in tissue (unless it's placed in a wet environment, in which case it breaks down faster.) Both compounds are things your body generates and metabolizes on a daily basis, and no trace of the suture remains in the body once it's been broken down, hence the suture is "absorbable." Absorbable products can be made of synthetic compounds (Vicryl and other synthetic absorbable sutures, hyaluronic acid preparations) or of naturally occurring substances (plain and chromic gut sutures, various preparations of collagen).

Back to TFA, this stuff doesn't look a whole lot different from demineralized bone matrix, which is already fairly common (although expensive as hell). DBX doesn't really provide any immediate structural strength to compromised bone, since it's only bone protein with no mineral structure. It just provides a scaffold for the body's own osteoblasts to build on - it allows them to skip a step in fracture repair, in other words. Calling it "injectable bone" might be a bit of a stretch.

(Full disclosure: The author is a former surgical rep turned nursing student.)

What's so hard about supporting an electric car?

Quite a bit, if you think about it:

1) Educating and qualifying mechanics to work on the car. Your average Joe at the gas station isn't going to be able to service this thing right off the bat, nor will he be able to open the hood and figure it out after a few minutes' inspection. At least for the first two or three years this car is on the market, you'll be forced to rely on dealer service, simply because there won't be trained mechanics anywhere else. And if you break down someplace where there isn't a dealer handy, you're hosed. A hobbyist owner might be able to repair the car, to a greater or lesser extent, but those repairs might void the warranty, or in some states may disqualify the car from street service entirely.

2) Availability of parts. There is lots and lots more that goes into an electric car, or indeed any car, besides a few hundred feet of wire, an electric motor and a few batteries. If your alternator dies, if you have to replace a transmission or some other drivetrain component, if your windshield cracks, all of those require many more parts to complete beyond the obvious part that's malfunctioning. The problem is compounded if you have multiple systems damaged at once, as in the context of an accident. You'll have to have some mechanism in place to get those parts from their Chinese manufacturers to a U.S. dealer service department, quickly and efficiently. (This is harder than it sounds; as a personal example, I can confirm that for a certain well-known German luxury manufacturer, a replacement front bumper fascia took three weeks to ship from Stuttgart, where replacing the same part on an American vehicle took two days.)

On a related note, you also have to worry about the general lack of infrastructure. Right or wrong, as it stands right now the entire transportation infrastructure in the US is set up to deal with internal combustion vehicles. Changing over to an electric infrastructure is going to take time, at least two or three years and probably more like five or seven, during which time the drivers of electric vehicles are going to be at a major disadvantage. You won't be able to charge most places, won't be able to get service most places, might not be able to drive on freeways or other limited access roads (at least here, freeways are restricted to internal combustion vehicles with engines greater than 125 CC displacement, which can't be powered farm equipment, and must be able to maintain a minimum speed of 55 MPH). Those restrictions might be enough to put people off electrics entirely, or at the very least slow their adoption. It'd be a damned shame if that happened, but it's a very real risk. In the meanwhile, everyone who bought these electric cars will be in the lurch, and if the manufacturer folds, the vehicles will be little more than hobby pieces.