Ch. 1New approaches for estimating and improving the grain-boundary conduction in stabilized zirconia1Ch. 2Effective elastic moduli of alumina, zirconia and alumina-zirconia composite ceramics31Ch. 3Progress in bioceramic materials101Ch. 4Novel bioactive hydroxyapatite-base ceramics and gelatin-impregnated composites133Ch. 5Thermal stresses in particle-matrix system and related phenomena : application to Sic-Si[subscript 3]N[subscript 4] ceramics147Ch. 6Novel bone-repairing materials : bioactive organic-inorganic hybrids197Ch. 7Effect of sample size and distribution parameters in estimation of confidence lower bounds for Weibull percentiles215