Injectable Electronics Light Up the Brain

Making electronic implants for the body is hard to do: Tissue is delicate and stiff components can irritate it. Then there’s getting those implants into the relevant organ without invasive surgery.

To help solve these problems, John A. Rogers, a materials science professor at the University of Illinois, and Michael Bruchas, an anesthesiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, built an electronic LED device so tiny it can be injected into delicate tissue, such as in the brain, without harming it. The experiment appears in this week’s issue of the journal Science.