Stop the press! IBM Research announced this morning that it has discovered a whole new class of... plastics. This might not sound quite as sexy as, say, MIT discovering a whole new state of matter -- but wait until you hear what these new plastics can do. This new class of plastics -- or more accurately, polymers -- are stronger than bone, have the ability to self-heal, are light-weight, and are 100% recyclable. The number of potential uses, spanning industries as disparate as aerospace and semiconductors, is dizzying. A new class of polymers hasn't been discovered in over 20 years -- and, in a rather novel twist, they weren't discovered by chemists: they were discovered by IBM's supercomputers.