Self-healing Rubber

Talk about a healing factor that sounds straight out of a comic book – French researchers have successfully developed a kind of artificial rubber made out of vegetable oil and a component of urine that “produces surfaces when cut that retain a strong chemical attraction to each other”. These cut pieces will the join together again without having the need for glue or special treatment, thanks to careful engineering of the molecules in the material. The entire process is almost green, and it will take a few tweaks here and there to make it fully so. The benefits of using this material is countless – imagine bags and equipment being made out of it that will virtually never wear out, saving our landfills precious space in the process.