Bendable electronics are nothing new. But that's an old trick. Now scientists have made stretchy circuitry! Engineers have been eyeing on elastic electronics for a long time. With current constraints, it means that most circuits are solid or at best slightly flexible. The possibilities of stretchy circuitry could mean a lot of things, for one, your conductors could stretch to many times their length.

But when most conducting materials are stretched, their material properties change, and their conductivity typically drops by factors of tens or hundreds making them pretty much useless.

A team from the McCormick School of Engineering has developed such elasticity with effect by loading a polymer with liquid metal. They took porous polymer material called poly (dimethylsiloxane), that can stretch to many times its original size and placed a liquid metal called EGaIn inside the pores to allow electricity to flow consistently.

The new material, which is discussed in an article in Nature Communications, can stretch to twice its length without any drop in conductivity.

[Nature Communications via Science Daily Image by odolphie under Creative Commons license]