For all the talk and research that has gone into exploiting graphene’s pliant properties for use in wearable and flexible electronics, most of the polymer composites it has been mixed with to date have been on the hard and inflexible side.

It took a team of researchers in Ireland to combine graphene with the children’s toy Silly Putty to set the nanomaterial community ablaze with excitement. The combination makes a new composite that promises to make a super-sensitive strain sensor with potential medical diagnostic applications.

In research described in the journal Science, scientists at AMBER, the Science Foundation Ireland-funded materials science research center based at Trinity College Dublin, discovered that if you added nanosheets into a low-viscosity material like silly putty, its electromechanical properties dramatically changed. You suddenly have an extremely sensitive strain sensor.

When you apply a voltage to the graphene-infused silly putty,…[Read more]