Image: damage after impact in a dyed material/Ryan Gergely
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Imagine if we didn’t have this process, if when we get hurt, we just stay hurt like a crack on a smart-phone screen or gash in a tire. Life on Earth would be considerably more terrifying. Now follow that thought in the opposite direction: imagine if smart-phone screens and tires could heal on their own, just like we do. It’d be a future in which we no longer have to ceaselessly replace the things that we build. The cracked screen doesn’t go in the trash, it becomes once again intact. The space suit tear 230 miles above the planet’s surface? It seals itself up just in time (about 30 seconds, for the record). These are the promises of self-healing materials, a very new subfield of materials science tasked with the development of synthetics that fix themselves just like human tissue, or at least very close to it. It would be a world at least much closer to one without waste.A future in which we no longer have to ceaselessly replace the things that we build.
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