Golden touchTo the naked eye, it looks like this person has...
Golden touch
To the naked eye, it looks like this person has solid strips of gold on their hand. But those strips are actually meshes of gold fibers less than 1 µm wide. The mesh structure allows the fibers to move around and slip past each other without snapping. The resulting stretchiness allows the mesh to conform to and move with small features such as skin’s wrinkles or a fingerprint’s ridges. These gold strips can stretch to about 130% of their original length while staying intact and conducting electricity in electronics like the red light-emitting diode shown. Takao Someya’s group at the University of Tokyo is currently looking into using this material in a touch, temperature, and pressure sensor. Such a sensor could help make so-called electronic skin—sensors that behave like human skin and could be applied, for example, to prosthetics.
Credit: Takao Someya Group/University of Tokyo
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