Artificial skin can detect nearby objects without even touching them

An artificial skin is even better than human skin at sensing objects, because it can detect and identify items that it hasn't touched yet. "Human skin has to touch something to tell it what is there," says Yifan Wang at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. "Human skin can only tell the softness or hardness of an object. We wanted our artificial skin to have more functions." Even without touching an object, Wang and his colleagues' artificial skin can sense if it is close by and can also discern some clues about the type of material it is made of.