It's un-healable, and if I'm particularly tired, I'll wake up and I'll open my eye and I'll be in agony.
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Election night 2016 is being processed, slowly, as a collective trauma, and it's normal — even expected — not to have fully healed, or be fully healable, from that.
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Other than recycling, vitrimer materials show promise for applications in medicine, for example self-healable bioepoxy, and applications in self-healing electronic screens. While these polymeric systems are still in their infancy they serve to produce commercially relevant, recyclable materials in the coming future as long as more work is done to tailor these chemical systems to commercially relevant monomers and polymers, as well as develop better mechanical testing and understanding of material properties throughout the lifetime of these materials (i.e. post reprocess cycles).
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One of the most energy-demanding and costly processes in macromolecular engineering is solution processing, as polymer solutions are viscous due to chain entanglement. Thermally bisignate supramolecular polymerization has the potential to solve this universal issue in macromolecular engineering. Aida has made significant contributions to filling the gap between supramolecular and conventional (covalent) polymerizations and inspired the field through the development of a variety of innovative materials by expansion of the basic concept of supramolecular polymerization. Representative examples include (1) "bucky gels", carbon nanotubes physically crosslinked by ionic liquids and the use of this technology for graphite exfoliation to graphene, and the fabrication of the first metal-free stretchable electronics and battery-driven dry actuators for manufacturing mobile Braille devices, (2) "aqua materials", highly water-rich (organic content of 0.1–0.2% for ultralow dependency on fossil resources) hydrogels anomalously having significant mechanical robustness or geometrical anisotropy, (3) ATP-responsive nanotubular carriers composed of chaperonin proteins, a biomolecular machine, (4) non-crosslinked photoactuators, (5) ferroelectric columnar liquid crystals, (6) mechanically robust yet self-healable polymer glass, (7) self-healable high-temperature porous organic materials, and (8) optoelectrically rewritable core-shell columnar liquid crystals with an AND logic gate operation.
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High mechanical strength of a material and self-healing ability is generally mutually exclusive. Thus, a glassy material that can self-heal at room temperature remained a challenge until recently. In an elegant design, Takuzo Aida introduced an innovative polymer glass composed of a supramolecularly polymerized oligomeric ether thiourea, which is mechanically robust (e= 1.4 GPa) but can self-heal, even at room temperature, just by a compression at the fractured surfaces. The invention of self-healable polymer glass updated the preconception that only soft rubbery materials can heal.
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Such nanoarays were tested for various types of cancers, chronic and acute kidney disease, hepatic disease, pulmonary arterial hypertension and more. His group has been able to discriminate even between sub-categories of a specific disease as well as between volatile organic compounds that are associated with genetic mutations of important disease states (P53, K-RAS, EGFR, and ALK). His team has also developed and characterized artificially-intelligent systems called "smart patches" that imitate the human skin, in the sense they can simultaneously feel pressure (or touch), humidity, temperature and chemical analytes. These self-healable smart patches can equip computers, robots and smart objects with the sense of touch, enabling them to feel their surroundings.
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Since the properties of gels depend on the type of non- covalent interactions involved, the metal-ligand interaction provide not only thermodynamic stability, but also kinetic liability. The general method for synthesizing gels is to heat the solution, which contains the metal ion being used and investigated, along with the ligand that will form the metallogel around it, as well as any other compounds used to create the appropriate conditions for the reaction to proceed well, until all added solids (depending on the type of gel prepared) are dissolved in the solvent used, and then cooling it down until the gels are self-assembled and properly formed.Martínez-Calvo, M.; Kotova, O.; Möbius, M.; Bell, A.; McCabe, T.; Boland, J.; Gunnlaugsson, T. Healable Luminescent Self-Assembly Supramolecular Metallogels Possessing Lanthanide (Eu/Tb) Dependent Rheological And Morphological Properties. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, 137, 1983-1992.
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