#bendthespoon

[holymami]

“The answer is out there Neo. It's looking for you. And it will find you if you want it to.”

[msjerlthesciencegirl]

New Flexible Electronic Material Can Self-Heal After Being Cut in Half

The material could improve the durability of wearable electronics!

Under the umbrella principle, “adapt to changing conditions,” one of our sub-principles in biomimicry is, “maintain integrity through self-renewal.”  Think of the last time you bent a cheap spoon by eating ice cream right out of the container (that’s not just me, right?). When you go to bend the spoon back into the exact shape, you often over-compensate, and make the problem worse. The curvature persists. If you’re not an ice cream fiend, perhaps you’ve experienced it with a paperclip you’ve tried to straighten or curl back into shape.  The thing is, it isn’t your fault. 

When you bend metal, the microscopic crystals (which give metals their most apparent properties) bend, and shoot some material from one side of the crystal to the other. In other words, unless you heat/beat/treat them.... they won’t go back into their shape, because the structure has been permanently altered. So, creating a metal that acts more like a self-healing biological structure is huge for industries from medical to electronic. 

Again, this isn’t biomimicry, but it serves as a good example of one property we can emulate from life.