News from all over - Paris
Philippe Cordier and colleagues at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris have made a self-healing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by simply pressing the broken edges back together for a few minutes.
The material, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, can be broken and repaired over and over again. It is made from simple ingredients - fatty acids like those found in vegetable oils, and urea, a waste compound in urine that can be made synthetically.
The material can "withstand multiple fractures, needs no catalysts and is otherwise straightforward to produce," Justin Mynar and Takuzo Aida of the University of Tokyo wrote in an accompanying article. "A final blessing is that it can be broken down with heat and easily recycled - so it is environmentally friendly, too."
Source
The material, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, can be broken and repaired over and over again. It is made from simple ingredients - fatty acids like those found in vegetable oils, and urea, a waste compound in urine that can be made synthetically.
The material can "withstand multiple fractures, needs no catalysts and is otherwise straightforward to produce," Justin Mynar and Takuzo Aida of the University of Tokyo wrote in an accompanying article. "A final blessing is that it can be broken down with heat and easily recycled - so it is environmentally friendly, too."
Source
