It's a device that brings to mind the bodyless hand, Thing, from The Addams Family: a human-like robotic hand, engineered by scientists at the University of Washington, that can learn on its own as it handles a specific task. The hand has five fingers, tendons, joints, over a hundred sensors, and is capable of moving faster than its human counterpart. In a video the university released, the hand can be seen delicately rotating a tube full of coffee beans-- an activity that the robot can improve iteratively, the university said. "Hand manipulation is one of the hardest problems that roboticists have to solve," Vikash Kumar, a doctoral student at the University of Washington and the lead author on a new paper about the robot hand, said in a statement. "A lot of robots today have pretty capable arms but the hand is as simple as a suction cup or maybe a claw or a gripper."