Indestructible electronics are a step closer to reality thanks to engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who have developed what they are calling “self-healing” integrated chips. The team from the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science repeatedly blasted tiny power amplifiers with a high-power laser, vaporizing many of their components, then watched the chips develop their own work-arounds in less than a second. By Ron Grunsby, editor