Skin

Our skin tells us about our surroundings by [detecting:selecting] [temperature:fracture] , pressure and other external conditions. If a pot handle is too hot to touch, we can feel this heat before burning our hand. Robots may [someday:somewhat] have this [protection:connection] too. A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a large-area sensor network integrated into a thin plastic film that acts like an electronic skin. They demonstrated the concept with an e-skin [sample:crumble] about the size of a postage [stamp:clip] that lights up in the specific places it's [touched:matched] . The work is in the journal Nature Materials. The harder the e-skin gets pressed, the brighter the light.