Oh, it’s definitely interesting.
I think people here just got rubbed the wrong way because these articles often make it seem like Roman concrete is better than ours, rather than “look what they accidentally did occasionally”.

We can make self healing concrete today, we just usually opt not to, because the downsides or unpredictable nature makes it unsuitable for the significant cost increase.
The phrase “the bridge is infested with bacterial spore colonies” isn’t one that makes engineers happy.

We mostly know how they made theirs, and could make our own version of it, but we optimize for different things.
The Romans optimized for “that’s cement and it works well”, because they didn’t have anything close to the level of chemical understanding we do now.
We optimize for strength and predictability. Ours can hold a higher load and will likely need repairing about when we predict.

Roman concrete can sometimes, in certain circumstances and with variable effectiveness, repair certain types of damage by chemically interacting with the environment. So maybe it crumbles in a decade or maybe it lasts a millennium.

Article basically points at some researchers who are looking to see if they can bring that healing capability to modern concrete in a predictable and more versatile fashion.

I guess I don’t see how a surgeon being unwilling to do maintenance on a non-FDA approved medical device is fucked up.
If it fails to meet the criteria for being safely used in a medical context, it’s irresponsible to try to maintain it.

FDA approval is contingent on so many factors that even if it was entirely open source, including all hardware design and the instructions for assembly, maintenance, and manufature it would be entirely plausible for it to lose approval if the company responsible for continued development went bankrupt.

Without approval, no reputable surgeon will do anything beyond remove it.

A device not having a clear and unambiguously documented path for addressing defects found in the future is more than sufficient reason to lose approval.

It might have none, or it might turn out to have some unexpected application way down the line.

The fun part about basic mathematics research is that sometimes it suddenly just perfectly solves some other problem hundreds of years later.

Like that time in the 1800s a guy figured out a solution to a 350 year old problem, and then in the 90s we realized that it was a description of particle physics and all the math had just been sitting there waiting.