“Of course, there are lots of industries whose product engineers would love to translate this finding into intentional engineering approaches to create metals that automatically heal themselves in our structural applications,” lead-author Brad Boyce, a materials scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told Live Science. “Self-healing metals could be useful in a wide range of applications from airplane wings to automotive suspensions.”
Edited : clickbait title
Test was conducted during transmission electron microscope observation under high vacuum and at extremely small scale.
Powder metallurgy does as much “healing” many times over.
Isn’t the cold welding of metals in vacuum well-known? And couldn’t the electron beam provide energy to encourage the “healing” as well?