Flexible electronics  the kind that might be used in “smart” clothing, say, or in foldable displays that could make reading news online more like reading it in print  are still far from an everyday reality. But scientists in South Korea are reporting a significant advance toward the development of such devices.

In a paper in Nature, Jae-Young Choi of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and Keun Soo Kim and Byung Hee Hong of Sungkyunkwan University and colleagues describe a technique for making stretchable thin electrodes out of graphene.

Graphene is a single-layer sheet of carbon atoms (the building block, in fact, of the graphite used in pencils) and has properties that make electronics engineers swoon. But making graphene sheets of a practical size has proved problematic.

Image Stretchable graphene electrode patterns transferred onto a silicon-based polymer. Credit... Ji Hye Hong

The researchers used a process called chemical vapor deposition, in which methane gas mixed with hydrogen and argon is flowed over nickel foil at high temperatures, depositing carbon atoms from the methane on the nickel.