Silly Putty Makes For Super-Sensitive Sensors (popsci.com)

Jonathan Coleman's research group at Trinity College Dublin discovered that Silly Putty "becomes an incredibly sensitive strain detector that can track blood pressure, heart rate, and even a spider's footsteps" when mixed with graphene. Popular Science reports: That graduate student, Connor Boland -- who has since earned his doctorate -- made a batch of graphene in water and added the Silly Putty polymer. As he mixed them, the graphene sheets stuck to the polymer, creating a black goo the researchers dubbed "g-putty." When they ran an electrical current through the g-putty -- graphene-infused polymers can conduct electricity -- they discovered an extraordinary sensitivity. "If you touch it even with the slightest pressure or deformation, the electrical resistance will change significantly," Coleman says. "Even if you stretch or compress the Silly Putty by one percent of its normal size, the electrical resistance will change by a factor of five. And that's a huge change." That change makes g-putty about 500 times more sensitive than other deformation-detecting materials, which would respond to a similar compression with a mere one-percent change in electrical resistance. The results were published in the journal Science.

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[The Raven]

This sounds more practical that the typical announcement about 'breakthrough in carbon shaped like a sheet/tube/ball'. It doesn't require ultra-pure, pristine, 1cm by 1cm by 1 atom, made-from-the-ashes-of-the one-pure-angel type graphene. It's boring 'let's have the undergrads play around with carbon so they feel like their doing real science' quality graphene. That's pretty awesome, and makes this far more likely to go from a lab experiment to a practical invention with patents, profits, and benefits to daily life.