Scientists at SLAC and Stanford have found a way to turn a complex oxide known as LCMO, a normally brittle material, into a flexible membrane by using micromanipulators to stretch it on a tiny apparatus and then gluing it in place to preserve the stretch. By applying gentle heat to melt the glue they could flip it from being an insulator to a conductor and back again. Scientists want to be able to control and fine-tune this behavior for a new generation of electronics with applications in power transmission, transportation, computing, sensors and detectors.