If you happen to walk outside and unexpectedly find utility markings (paint or flags) on your driveway or in your yard, it’s good advice to heed the words splashed across the cover of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” — don’t panic, it’s not the end of the world. Next, if you didn’t call the utility company, check with your neighbors to see if one of them did, and if not, then call the nationwide 811 phone number used throughout the United States for underground utility location services, because someone is planning on doing work that might directly involve your little slice of heaven.

Most property owners probably know full well that beneath their perfectly manicured landscaping efforts lies a dizzying array of underground utility lines, irrigation systems (even those using smart controllers), and water and sewer pipes. It’s also probably safe to assume that most of us have no clue where those things are. It takes professionally trained people with the right tools to come out and locate them before anyone starts digging things up to avoid triggering a cataclysmic event. Even when professionals follow these exacting safety protocols, very bad things can still happen.

For instance, a house 15 miles south of Oakland, California, exploded in December 2025, after a construction crew hit a gas line. The house next door was also severely damaged, and six people were injured. More recently, 67 homes in Mountain View, California, were under a boil-water notice for weeks after a crew replacing the neighborhood’s water pipes allowed cement slurry to seep in, subsequently introducing bacteria into the drinking water.

For every project that involves digging into the ground – whether it’s a simple DIY effort to repair sprinkler lines, or a larger one carried out by city workers — the area needs to be inspected at least two days beforehand. Calling 811 sends utility companies out (at no charge) to locate and mark underground lines (gas, water, electric, internet, etc.) with flags and spray paint. This safety measure is a federal law meant to prevent damage to public infrastructure, personal injuries, or unwanted service outages.

The markings all have different meanings, but follow uniform color codes mandated by the American Public Works Association (APWA). Red indicates the presence of electric power lines (invented in 1882), lighting cables, and conduit. Orange means telecommunication, alarm/signal lines, cables, or conduit. Natural gas, oil, steam, petroleum, or other flammable substances will always be designated by the color yellow. Green notifies you of sewer and drain lines, while blue is for potable drinking water. Reclaimed water, irrigation, and slurry lines are represented by purple. Pink is used for temporary survey markings or things that are either unknown or unidentified. Lastly, white outlines proposed excavation limits or routes.

Utility markings should generally remain in place until the project is complete. And if you are the one doing the digging, check your state’s tolerance laws because you may need to use hand tools instead of mechanized equipment if you’re working within 24 inches of a marked line. Ultimately, it’s better to be safe than sorry, because nobody wants to be responsible for causing a problem that brands them as “that person” in their neighbor’s eyes forever.

Displays have come a long way, from monstrous CRT televisions to thin, lightweight LCDs and the portable smartphone displays we have now. The transition to wearable displays, however, has been thwarted by the annoying habit of OLED displays to break instead of bending. That might not be a problem anymore, as South Korean researchers, in collaboration with counterparts at Philadelphia-based Drexel University, claim to have developed a new type of OLED display that is both bendable and stretchable.

Flexible OLED displays have been around for more than a decade, but current foldable smartphones have serious drawbacks, such as significantly reduced display durability. Repeated folding and unfolding cause micro-fractures in the conductive traces and the gradual degradation of the organic layers of the OLED substrate. This manifests as visible damage and reduced image quality. The same weakness also makes it extremely difficult to integrate the current generation of flexible OLED displays into wearables that will likely be subject to repeated stretching and folding cycles.

The new flexible OLED display, described in the journal Nature, uses nanomaterials that allow it to be safely stretched to a whopping 1.6 times its original size. While contemporary wearable displays lose a significant amount of their brightness upon stretching, this nanomaterial-enhanced OLED display can allegedly retain 83% of its light output after 100 cycles rated at 2% strain. Let’s take a look at what makes this new technology tick.

Traditional flexible OLED displays cannot endure many bending and stretching cycles due to the fragility of the conductive electrodes and organic layers that make up the panel. The electrical underpinnings wear out over repeated strain cycles, while the stretchable polymer layers introduced to enhance flexibility and durability reduce the display’s brightness and energy efficiency.

The new flexible OLED design overcomes those shortcomings by using a nanomaterial dubbed MXene to create transparent and stretchable electrodes. Developed by Drexel University’s College of Engineering in 2011, the nanomaterial combines excellent electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, stretchability, and transparency. This allows for a bendable display that claims to retain almost 90% of its performance and efficiency when stretched up to 60% of its maximum strain limit.

The researchers’ claims of impressive light efficiency stem from a new stretchable organic layer, called an exciplex-assisted phosphorescent (ExciPh) layer, that essentially alters the energy level of the OLED system to produce light more efficiently. An OLED pixel produces light by combining the positive and negative charges generated by the electrodes, which eventually unite to form an exciton. The subsequent decay of these excitons generates the electroluminescence driving individual OLED pixels. The new ExciPh layer lets more than 57% of excitons produce light, much higher than the 12% to 22% of traditional flexible OLEDs. This makes for a flexible display that’s not only more durable but also significantly brighter.

While the publication of research papers on high-tech displays and other promising phone-related technologies doesn’t always translate into consumer products, this joint US–Korean research endeavor did at least result in displays that offer a glimpse of the future. Drexel University researchers demonstrated the efficacy of their stretchable OLED display technology with two green monochrome displays: one depicted a heart icon, while the other showed a set of numbers.

Their counterparts at Seoul National University went one step further, developing a full-color stretchable display, replete with stretchable passive-matrix OLEDs. In other words, this flexible OLED technology already seems relatively mature, and deploying it in low-power wearable display solutions is not out of the realm of possibility.

The authors of this research paper list real-time health care monitoring and wearable communications technology as the potential applications of the stretchable OLED display prototypes demonstrated in their journal publication. Meanwhile, contemporary research into stretchable batteries, as discussed in ACS Energy Letters, seems to herald a future where wearable displays are the norm rather than science fiction.