A team of really smart people from Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering has stumbled upon a way to create electronics that bend and stretch four times as much as current “flexible” technologies.

The team created a porous, three-dimensional compound called poly(dimethylsiloxane) and filled it with a liquid metal conductor (EGaIn, in case you’re interested) to achieve this feat. Current circuitry technology uses solid metals that can lose as much 100 times their electrical conductivity when stretched or bent.

“By combining a liquid metal in a porous polymer, we achieved 200 percent stretchability in a material that does not suffer from stretch. Once you achieve that technology, any electronic can behave like a rubberband,” said environmental engineering and mechanical engineering professor Yonggang Huang.

And, the current-carrying capacity for the new technology is good enough for interconnects in light-emitting diode (LED) systems.

Huang’s paper, Three-dimensional Nanonetworks for Giant Stretchability in Dielectrics and Conductors, was recently published in Nature Communications and can be found here.