Secular Café: 'Living' Plastic

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

'Living' Plastic Mar 28th 2012, 09:47 :dunno: Quote: New Plastics 'Bleed' When Cut or Scratched -- And Then Heal Like Human Skin ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) — A new genre of plastics that mimic the human skin's ability to heal scratches and cuts offers the promise of endowing cell phones, laptops, cars and other products with self-repairing surfaces, scientists reported March 27. The team's lead researcher described the plastics, which change color to warn of wounds and heal themselves when exposed to light, in San Diego at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). "Mother Nature has endowed all kinds of biological systems with the ability to repair themselves," explained Professor Marek W. Urban, Ph.D., who reported on the research. "Some we can see, like the skin healing and new bark forming in cuts on a tree trunk. Some are invisible, but help keep us alive and healthy, like the self-repair system that DNA uses to fix genetic damage to genes. Our new plastic tries to mimic nature, issuing a red signal when damaged and then renewing itself when exposed to visible light, temperature or pH changes." Urban, who is with the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg foresees a wide range of potential applications for plastic with warn-and-self-repair capabilities. Scratches in automobile fenders, for instance, might be repaired by simply exposing the fender to intense light. Critical structural parts in aircraft might warn of damage by turning red along cracks so that engineers could decide whether to shine the light and heal the damage or undertake a complete replacement of the component. And there could be a range of applications in battlefield weapons systems. Plastics have become so common, replacing steel, aluminum, glass, paper and other traditional materials because they combine desirable properties such as strength, light weight and corrosion resistance. Hundreds of scientists around the world have been working, however, to remedy one of the downsides of these ubiquitous materials: Once many plastics get scratched or cracked, repairs can be difficult or impossible. Self-healing plastics have become a Holy Grail of materials science. One approach to that goal involves seeding plastics with capsules that break open when cracked or scratched and release repairing compounds that heal scratches or cuts. Another is to make plastics that respond to an outside stimulus -- like light, heat or a chemical agent -- by repairing themselves. .... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0327091223.htm

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