By Eddie Wrenn
Artificial skin could soon be created which could be sensitive enough to feel the steps of a lady-bird, or for the cruel-hearted, the stretching and tearing of a Chinese burn.
Engineers at Seoul National University are working on a prototype 'flexible electronic sensor', which uses interlocks hairs which can sense objects through static attraction.
The breakthrough - which was based on research into natural hairs on a beetle's back - could mean artificial limbs could be made to be more sensitive.
The artificial hairs are created from polymer fibres - tiny sheets of material is just 100 nanometres in diametre and a micrometre (one millionth of a metre) in length.
While invisible to the human hair, their tiny size and shape, and their metallic covering which makes them conductive to electricity, all combine to allow highly-sensitive readings.
Some of the potential uses for the skin includes using it as a heart monitor, which can be strapped to the wrist to detect your pulse.
Indeed the artificial skin can pick up brief touches which would not be detectable to humans - touches with a force of just five pascals can be 'felt' by the hairs.
The hairs can detect 'pressure', for instance a weight landing on the on the sheet, 'shear', such as an object sliding across the surface, and the twisting motion, like you might associate with that cruel and childish Chinese burn.
These final two movements are traditionally hard for mechanical objects to detect, but thanks to the electrical, microscopic hairs, the different signals can now be decoded.
The team has tested the pads by bouncing water droplets on the surface and testing out pule detection.
And in perhaps the cutest experiment in the history of science, they got a pair of ladybirds to walk across its surface.
VIDEO: Watch parts of the experiment, including the water droplet test!...
