Of course, there are lots of industries whose product engineers would love to translate this finding into intentional engineering approaches to create metals that automatically heal themselves in our structural applications," lead-author Brad Boyce, a materials scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told Live Science. “Self-healing metals could be useful in a wide range of applications from airplane wings to automotive suspensions.”
Edited: clickbait title
So I am not giving that clickbait title a view. Anyone have a summary? What is new here? Self-healing materials aren’t new, and stainless steel is self-healing so the whole “first time” claim is obviously B.S. unless it is tied to some specific novel property.
Here is the abstract in nature
Spoiler alert: “However, unexpectedly, cracks were also observed to heal by a process that can be described as crack flank cold welding (etc…)”.
It’s cold welding, and not even in a novel way. They used a vacuum and pretended this was some new phenomenon that we haven’t known about for around the past 80 years.