Scott White and his team from the material at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a polymer.
For full details check out the New Scientist website but essentially the material uses a ‘healing’ polymer contained in microspheres that are set into the host material or catalyst. When the host cracks the microspheres break open and heal the gaps, creating a bond stronger than the original material.
Further use depends on them hitting their performance targets within cost, but the range of uses could be massive. For a start it’d be ideal for all those troublesome frame and component failures – they might even make a frame that’ll last Pete Jones over a year. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it Pete!