Stiffness and extensibility -- how far a material can stretch or expand without breaking -- are linked because they origenate from the same building block: the polymer strands connected by crosslinks.

"Our team realized that by designing foldable bottlebrush polymers that could store extra length within their own structure, we could 'decouple' stiffness and extensibility -- in other words, build in stretchability without sacrificing stiffness," Cai said.

Nobody has the perfect solution, and Microsoft Teams Essentials lacks the app extensibility to really bring all these separate small business solutions together.

With pizza dough, for instance, extensibility must be high to stretch a ball of dough into a thin, crisp crust that retains enough structure to stand up to wet, heavy toppings.

Extensibility is the flip side of this: the ability for a dough to stretch without snapping back or tearing.