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Maybe something to look at for Ricarda? Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a first-of-its-kind self-healing gel that repairs and connects electronic circuits, creating opportunities to advance the development of flexible electronics, biosensors and batteries as energy storage devices. "There's no need for heat or light to fix the crack or break in a circuit or battery, which is often required by previously developed self-healing materials." Yu and his team created the self-healing gel by combining two gels: a self-assembling metal-ligand gel that provides self-healing properties and a polymer hydrogel that is a conductor.

Ricarda??

Sottos, White, Moore, and their team created 3D vascular networks-patterns of microchannels filled with healing chemistries-that thread through a fiber-reinforced composite. When damage occurs, the networks within the material break apart and allow the healing chemistries to mix and polymerize, autonomously healing the material, over multiple cycles.

A crack team of engineers at the University of Illinois has developed an electronic circuit that autonomously self-heals when its metal wires are broken.

Chips are able to compensate for very large damage and continue working at high performance

Just over six years ago, we reported that Nissan had developed a "Scratch Guard Coat" paint designed to repair scratches on not only cars, but on painted surfaces in general. ... The Scratch Shield paint is made from polyrotaxane, which has a chemical structure that is able to react and change back to its original shape and fill the gap that results from a fine scratch.

A vascular synthetic system that restores mechanical performance in response to large-scale damage. Gap-filling scaffolds are created through a two-stage polymer chemistry that initially forms a shape-conforming dynamic gel but later polymerizes to a solid structural polymer with robust mechanical properties.

don't have access to the full paper myself. found from article in (ahem) the daily mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1260870/Nuclear-reactors-safer-scientists-discover-effect-self-repairs-radiation-damaged-materials.html

interesting .... have they so far been involved?

Luca and Tobias - have a look at this ... LS

Impressive video about self-healing rubber. The video shows how a piece of rubber broken into two recovers its elastic properties after resting for 24 hours.

The material the team used in these initial proof-of-concept experiments did make use of one biological component - chloroplasts, the light-harnessing components within plant cells, which the researchers obtained from spinach leaves.

The Florida team generated a specially shaped laser beam that could self-accelerate, or bend, sideways.

very nice!!! read this e.g. "In addition to this self-bending, the beam's intensity pattern also has a couple of other intriguing characteristics. One is that it is non-diffracting, which means that the width of each intensity region does not appreciably increase as the beam travels forwards. This is unlike a normal beam - even a tightly collimated laser beam - which spreads as it propagates. The other unusual property is that of self-healing. This means that if part of the beam is blocked by opaque objects, then any disruptions to the beam's intensity pattern could gradually recover as the beam travels forward."

Linked to the discussion we had last week on elastically non-linear polymers. The inverted liquid->solid phase transition might be interesting and the material might be self-healing just above the transition.