Self-Healing Rubber Products?

In a blog posted at Daily Tech, Jason Mick writes on how Dr. Anke Nellesen and colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology in Germany created an elastomeric material capable of responding to stresses with something of a “self-healing” property. While the process cannot be totally self-controlled–it requires external monitoring and input of ions–it does seems possible to automate it. Perhaps discoveries like this will lead to polymeric olefin and synthetic rubber membranes that can respond to stress before cracking and failure.