Science is great!

I came across this article in this week’s mailing from Physics World.  After listening to the Joy of Science from The Teaching Company I actually understood it too!  This stuff sounds pretty cool. 

Researchers create ‘self-healing’ rubber

Rubbery materials can be easily stretched, but it is not easy to mend them when they break, as anyone who has ever had a punctured car tyre will know. Now, however, researchers in France have created a unique new rubber-like material that can “self-heal” at room temperature. If the material is snapped in half, the two torn pieces can be made to mend themselves simply by bringing the broken surfaces back in contact with each other (Nature 451 977).

The new “supramolecular rubber” has been created by Ludwik Leibler and colleagues at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI/CNRS) in Paris, France. It consists of “fatty acids” — short chains of carbon atoms — linked together via hydrogen bonds to form a macroscopic 3D network. The material behaves just like an ordinary rubber in that it can stretch to several times its normal length when pulled.

But if the material is cut in half, the two broken pieces of the rubber can self-heal when brought together and simply held in contact for a few minutes. The fracture mends and the material can be stretched and pulled in all directions again. “It is important to stress that the material is not self-adhesive,” Leibler told physicsworld.com. “The surfaces of the material are never sticky to the touch and feel like a rubber band or a plastic bag. Self-mending is possible even 12 hours after the fracture occurred.”

Read the rest over at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32970.  

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