Each week, Nature‘s author page features “making the paper”, a behind-the-scenes look at one of the research papers in the current issue. This week’s (446, xi; 22 March 2007) featured author is Jeffrey Moore, a coauthor of the Letter “Biasing reaction pathways with mechanical force” (page 423), which describes a molecule that undergoes chemical reaction in response to stress.

From the “making the paper” article: " ‘Self-healing’ materials that can automatically repair their daily wear and tear could produce lenses that never scratch or cars that always look new. In 2001, Jeffrey Moore and his colleagues Scott White and Nancy Sottos at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, described one such self-healing polymer. Into the basic polymer material were embedded tiny capsules filled with liquid monomer. When the material was broken, the capsules ruptured, releasing monomers into the crack, where a catalyst induced their formation into new polymer to repair the break.

Moore and his colleagues wanted to find ways of promoting this repair without having to add a catalyst. They thought they could create molecules that would undergo the desired reaction in response to the physical stress itself. The idea that mechanical force can induce a chemical reaction has been around for years, but so far scientists had only used such force to break bonds. “If you can use mechanical force to break bonds, why not do something more interesting, like creating a reactive intermediate that might alter the material in useful ways,” says Moore. “We did not see any fundamental limitations.”

Read more about making the paper, in print or online, in the 22 March issue of Nature.

See here for a freely available video stream of the mechanically morphing molecules.