Silly Putty could stretch heart monitoring capabilities

Take a little Silly Putty, add an unusual form of carbon and what do you get? Possibly the key for new heart monitors and other medical devices.

Irish physicist Jonathan Coleman of Trinity College Dublin listened when a student suggesting mixing Silly Putty with graphene, a two-dimensional material that's an atom thick and a remarkable electricity conductor.

The children's toy was developed by accident during World War II by an engineer looking for a cheap substitute for synthetic rubber. Kids love playing with it, since you can bounce, stretch and mold it.

Silly Putty has “got these strange properties, but it never really found an application. So we thought, if we could make it do something, that would be cool,” Coleman told NPR.

No practical use had ever been found for graphene, either. It has remarkable properties: It's the thinnest known material and also the strongest, and it's capable of carrying a thousand times more electricity than copper. After the first paper on it was published in a scientific journal in 2004, many scientists raced to find a practical application. But, as the New Yorker described it in a 2014 feature, it's “fast, strong, cheap and impossible to use.”

Combining the two, however, produced a substance that's incredibly sensitive to pressure. It “can measure pulse, blood pressure, and even the impact associated with the footsteps of a small spider,” according to the study. Possible uses could include monitoring blood pressure and heart rates.