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Materials chemistry

Spot-on healing

Rubbery polymers have been made in which damage is healed by exposure to light. The healing mechanism allows localized, on-demand repair, and might help to extend the lifetimes of materials for many applications. See Letter p.334

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Figure 1: Healing on demand.

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Correspondence to Nancy R. Sottos or Jeffrey S. Moore.

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Sottos, N., Moore, J. Spot-on healing. Nature 472, 299–300 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/472299a

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