Japanese scientists say they’ve developed a fully-flexible, and stretchable, conductive skin for robots with carbon nantubes.

U.S. scientists this week also announced they have made a flexible material that might make an excellent covering for artificial eyeballs.

Material bends, stretches and conducts electricity? | Technology | Reuters
They stretched the sheet of material to nearly double its original size and it snapped back into place, without disrupting the transistors or ruining the material’s conductive properties.

The elastic conductor would allow electronic circuits to be mounted in places that would have been impossible up to now, including “arbitrary curved surfaces and movable parts, such as the joints of a robot’s arm,” Sekitani and colleagues wrote.