When Mingxin Ye watched his father endure three months of recovery from a broken bone, he began asking whether engineering — the discipline of making things hold — could be brought inside the human body to make healing faster. That question carried him from civil engineering to a PhD at the University of Western Australia, where he is now testing implants reinforced with Kevlar fibres to strengthen the carbon fibre devices surgeons use to stabilise fractures. In a country where broken bones account for more than 407,000 emergency presentations in a single year, the distance between a laborator