I think we can generally agree that things do not really last as long as before. I am quite sure you remember your first feature phone back when Nokia was an industry giant, wasn’t it a tough cookie? How about your grandfather’s TV and other electrical items – those tend to last for over a decade, decades even, before giving up the ghost, while today’s refrigerators and TVs tend to spoil after a short while, leading many to weigh the cost of an extended warranty. What if someone could come up with the circuits inside consumer electronics devices to have a healing factor? We are talking about self-healing circuits here, which could keep running longer thanks to liquid metal that fills up breaks in between.
Engineers over at the University of Illinois might be able to come across a working solution after working on a self-healing system for circuits which will jump starts electrical conductivity in cracked circuits. This is made possible by placing tiny microcapsules that are full of liquid metal on a gold line, functioning as a circuit so that electrical flow will be restored in a jiffy if the circuit cracks.
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