Human skin's natural ability to feel sensations such as touch and temperature difference is not easily replicated with artificial materials in the research lab. That challenge did not stop a Saudi Arabian research team from using cheap household items to make a "paper skin" that mimics many sensory functions of human skin. The artificial skin may represent the first single sensing platform capable of simultaneously measuring pressure, touch, proximity, temperature, humidity, flow, and pH levels. Previously, researchers have tried using exotic materials such as carbon nanotubes or silver nanoparticles to create sensors capable of measuring just a few of those things. By comparison, the team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia used common off-the-shelf materials such as paper sticky notes, sponges, napkins and aluminum foil.

The prosaically named Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project, a planned observatory to be built on Mauna Kea, the Big Island, in Hawaii, is huge in every way: a reported US 1.4 billion dollar budget, a giant mirror composed of 492 smaller mirror segments, and a goal of investigating not just the stars in our Milky Way but galaxies forming at the very edge of the observable universe. Though this project is backed by the governments of China, Japan, Canada, and India, as well as the United States, it may never be built. For its location is considered sacred by some Hawaiians, whose protests have been heard all the way to the State Supreme Court of Hawaii, which in December 2015 invalidated TMT's previously granted building permit. With the project suspended for over a year, involved scientist and construction companies can only keep their fingers crossed that the contested case will go their way. In the meantime, Mitsubishi Electric, which has developed the main structure of TMT, announced this week the completion of a prototype robot for a segmented-handling system (SHS) to install and replace the mirror segments.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your biped Automaton bloggers. We're also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. This a clever little promotional commercial for IBM's Watson, with Carrie Fisher and some other people you might recognize: The best thing about this is that almost all of those robots were physically constructed, not CGI. And each of them has its own little vignette, which you can see on IBM's YouTube channel.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your stigmergic Automaton bloggers. We're also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. "Academy Award -nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The Google Lunar XPRIZE is the largest prize competition of all time with a reward of 30 million and aims to incentivize entrepreneurs to create a new era of affordable access to the Moon and beyond, while inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers." "DARPA's Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program seeks to provide innovative cross-pollination between fixed-wing and rotary-wing technologies and by developing and integrating novel subsystems to enable radical improvements in vertical and cruising flight capabilities.

Scientists at Duke University have demonstrated a wireless brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows monkeys to navigate a robotic wheelchair using their thoughts. This is the first long-term wireless BMI implant that has given high-quality signals to precisely control a wheelchair's movements in real time. "This is the first wireless brain-machine interface for whole-body locomotion," says Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neuroscience at Duke who led the work published in the journal Scientific Reports. "Even severely disabled patients who cannot move any part of their body could be placed on a wheelchair and be able to use this device for mobility." Nicolelis and his colleagues pioneered brain-machine interfaces in a 1999 study on rats.

MIT's Personal Robotics Group has been one of the driving forces behind social robotics since… well, since they pretty much invented social robotics. Led by Professor Cynthia Breazeal, who is also founder of social robot startup Jibo, the MIT group has built an amazing collection of smart, cute, and squishy creatures, and now they have a new one. The latest, smartest, cutest, and squishiest social robot that MIT has been testing out is named Tega, and it's already gotten to work, adorably teaching Spanish to preschoolers. We spoke with Jackie Kory Westlund, a Ph.D. student in the MIT Media Lab who's been doing research with Tega, about why it's such a useful social assistive robotics platform and how to keep preschoolers from utterly destroying it with hugs. To provide some context for Tega, have a look at a couple of the other robots developed by MIT's Personal Robotics Group, which is really just an excuse to post one of my favorite robot videos of all time: You can sort of imagine that Dragonbot and Tofu maybe got extra cuddly one lonely night at the Media Lab, and Tega was the result.

Last night Google's AI AlphaGo won the first in a five-game series against the world's best Go player, in Seoul, South Korea. The success comes just five months after a slightly less experienced version of the same program became the first machine to defeat any Go professional by winning five games against the European champion. This victory was far more impressive though because it came at the expense of Lee Sedol, 33, who has dominated the ancient Chinese game for a decade. The European champion, Fan Hui, is ranked only 663rd in the world. And the machine, by all accounts, played a noticeably stronger game than it did back in October, evidence that it has learned much since then.

It's coming, it's really coming, and it's going to be huuuuugggge! That was the message of the tech company executives keynoting the annual Open Compute Project Summit, held this week in San Jose, Calif. They were talking about data. More data than anybody--even in an era in which 300 hours of video is posted to YouTube every minute--has yet seen. They boasted that it is leading to a far more adaptable and efficient infrastracture than would have been possible in an era of proprietary systems.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your mysophobic Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. XDog is a small electric quadruped designed and built by Xing Wang, a graduate student at Shanghai University, with support from his adviser Jia Wenchuan. The robot has 12 motors (each leg has 3 DoF), and uses force sensors on each foot, IMU, and joint-angle sensors for control.

The Bedford, Mass.-based company, which has sold millions of its disc-shaped Roomba vacuums, is expanding its family of cleaning automatons. The new robot is the Braava jet, a small, shiny white robotic mop designed to clean hard floors, especially in bathrooms and kitchens. And did we say it's square? But perhaps the biggest surprise about the Braava jet is not its shape; it's the price: US 200. This is iRobot's most affordable cleaning bot ever.