When the Robots Sing "Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me", the E-Skin is Working

That's right, e-skin. A group of scientists at UC-Berkeley devised a flexible mesh using nanowires to create a substance that reacts to pressure, and, as their paper in Nature Materials said, "effectively functions as an artificial electronic skin." In the same issue, a team from Stanford University announced it had devised a kind of skin so sensitive, it can detect the weight of a bluebottle fly. All of which means for one shining issue, a scientific journal was a skin mag. Anyway, Stanford offered a fine video of its invention: Devised by a team lead by Zhenan Bao, puts highly specialized rubber between two electrodes. The rubber holds the electric charge until something alights on it (or has its dessicated corpse plunked on it). The rubber distorts, changing the amount of charge its holding, which is picked up by the electrodes and transmitted as a signal. Javey's e-skin also measures extremely small changes in pressure: from 0 to 15 kilopascals (equivalent to 2.17 psi), about the level of force needed to type on a keyboard or hold an object.