Process converts wood into a squishy sensor

Carbon-based materials that bounce back when you press them are in demand for flexible electronics and energy storage devices alike. Most of the available options have limitations, though: They come from nonrenewable sources, have inferior electrical properties, or are difficult to manufacture on scale. Now, researchers have revealed a compressible material with promising electrical properties from a sustainable, if somewhat surprising, source: wood. University of Maryland, College Park, engineer Liangbing Hu presented the work last week at the ACS national meeting in New Orleans. To make the spongy material, Hu, postdoctoral researcher Chaoji Chen, and colleagues were inspired by honeycombs, which have a wavy lattice that stands up to compression. They hypothesized they might be able to chemically change wood’s architecture to achieve a similar effect. Indeed, by stripping away lignin and hemicellulose from a block of balsa wood, they transformed the wood’s rigid, boxlike cell walls into a lattice