Here at Future-ish, we're always on the lookout for interesting developments in robotics. Most advances are pretty cool, but some innovations also make you wonder if we should be paying closer attention to the lessons about robotics presented in scifi.
The "terminator" polymer is a perfect example. Sure, the development of a self healing polymer is pretty amazing and offers potential design solutions across many industries but even the creators of the polymer, a team of researchers based in Spain, made the connection to the T-1000 robot in the movie, Terminator 2 referring to their invention as the "terminator" polymer. Self healing materials have been around for a while but the special characteristic of this polymer is that is self heals at room temperature rather than requiring heat or chemicals.
A short demonstration of the process was published on YouTube by the researchers:
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