Imagine if your phone was always awake and processing data. How long would the battery last? Three hours? One hour? The next generation of electronics will require that kind of always-on energy consumption, but our current batteries are far from powerful enough to accommodate that.

Enter supercapacitors, which can store a much larger amount of energy in the same amount of space. Supercapacitors are generally not known for their stretchiness, but researchers based out of Duke, MIT and other laboratories have now created them out of crumpled sheets of graphene, a strong but stretcy material with interesting properties. They published their work in the journal Scientific Reports last week.

Graphene in various states of being crumpled. Photo by the researchers.

Graphene is made of a layer of carbon atoms just a single atom thick. To create a supercapacitor, the Duke team sandwiched a layer of stretchy gel between two sheets of graphene.