Silly Putty is more than a toy
Copy article link
Save
This column falls into the stocking stuffer category, a first for us. Every Christmas, many people follow the tradition of hanging stockings in anticipation of having them filled with goodies on Christmas morning. Typically, stocking stuffers are small gifts, candy and toys. A popular option is Silly Putty, a cheap and versatile fun toy. But it can be more than a stocking stuffer; it can also be used in medicine.
The story goes that Saint Nicholas once surprised a poor family by filling the daughters stockings with gold while they were hanging to dry by the fireplace. Silly Putty was more fun to receive as a kid. I remember molding it into various shapes, bouncing it off the walls and pressing it onto my favorite comic strip to lift a perfect image of it only to pull it in various directions to distort it and driving my parents crazy.
In 1943, there was a shortage of rubber, and Japan controlled most of the sources of natural rubber. Industrial scientists were looking for synthetic rubber substitutes when they came up with a mixture of boric acid and silicone oil. The resulting compound had some weird properties, when you rolled it into a ball and threw it on the floor, it bounced well. But if you set it on the table or stretched it very, very slowly, it would flow as if it was a thick liquid.
The substance theyd created was not a good substitute for rubber. So, the scientists gave some of the bouncing putty away to local kids, and word got around. By 1950, an entrepreneur began marketing Silly Putty. He hired Yale students to package it into plastic eggs, and the rest is history. In 2001, Silly Putty was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.
Fast forward to 2022, and add an Irish physicist working with another unusual compound called graphene. Graphene consists of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a lattice-like a honeycomb. It is many times stronger than steel, incredibly lightweight, but also flexible. It conducts both heat and electricity but is also transparent. It is also the worlds first two-dimensional material because it is one million times thinner than the diameter of a human hair. Leave it to a science students imagination to think of combining Silly Putty with graphene flakes.
The result retains all the fun properties of Silly Putty, but the graphene makes it extremely sensitive to pressure. The slightest pressure changes its electrical resistance. Press a bit over someones carotid artery, and you can not only measure pulse, but you can also get other detailed information like blood pressure from it.
This development was published in the prestigious journal Science and opens the door to the development of sensitive electromechanical sensors that have many potential biomedical applications. Its even sensitive enough to detect the impact of a small spiders footsteps! We cant wait to see what applications of this will be, and well still play with regular Silly Putty at our desks.
Medical Discovery News
is a weekly radio and print broadcast highlighting medical and scientific breakthroughs hosted by professor emeritus, Norbert Herzog, and professor, David Niesel, biomedical scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Learn more at
Wednesday, April 5, 2023 at 2:45 am