In Terminator 2, the blank-faced one-liner machine played by Arnold Schwarznegger has to escape the T-1000, the terrifying android assassin played by an equally blank-faced Robert Patrick. What made the T-1000 such a powerful machine (and what made 10-year-old me lose her mind) was its ability to heal itself quickly, regardless of which character shot it in the face. And now a less-menacing version of that kind of self-repairing technology could be coming from Sarah Connor’s onscreen nightmare to an airplane wing near you.
After three years of research, a team of scientists from the University of Bristol (England) has developed airplane wings that can repair themselves after being cracked or damaged. Professor Duncan Wass and his colleagues – who primarily work with carbon fiber composites – have added tiny “microspheres” to the material, an almost-imperceptible addition that break and release “a healing agent” into cracks or damaged sections of the wing. When the microspheres are exposed to a catalyst, the agent then hardens to seal and repair the affected area. Wass told The Independent:
We took inspiration from the human body. We’ve not evolved to withstand any damage – if we were like that we’d have a skin as thick as a rhinoceros – but if we do get damaged, we bleed, and it scabs and heals. We just put that same sort of function into a synthetic material: let’s have something that can heal itself.