The research looked at PCDTPT, a conductive plastic studied for flexible electronics. The NIST story compared the polymer strands to gummy worms: each strand alternates between electron-donor and electron-acceptor parts.

The surprising result was that the material stayed conductive even when the strands were suspended in liquid instead of packed into a solid. That suggested conductivity was happening mainly along individual strands, not only between neighboring strands.

I used the gummy-worm analogy in two ways: first to show the alternating donor and acceptor parts within a strand, and then to compare strands packed in a solid with strands isolated in liquid.