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
Here is the abstract in nature
Spoiler alert: “However, unexpectedly, cracks were also observed to heal by a process that can be described as crack flank cold welding (etc…)”.