It was created by a team of researchers from Stanford University, who implanted soft e-skin electrodes in the brains of rats and recorded electrical signals from the animals' motor cortex, the region of the brain responsible for carrying out voluntary movements. The animals twitched their legs in response to different levels of pressure recorded by the brain, depending on the strength of the stimulation frequency, demonstrating that the e-skin was able to detect differing levels of pressure in the same way that animals and humans can do ordinarily. The team says the work could lead to better prosthetics and could help create robots that can feel human-like sensations. The research is published in a paper in Science today. "Our dream is to make a whole hand where we have multiple sensors that can sense pressure, strain, temperature, and vibration," says Zhenan Bao, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford University, who worked on the project.

Despite computers performing increasingly impressive feats, when it comes to recognising real world objects, they have fallen short. But the machines are learning that just like the robots of sci-fi blockbusters, being able to tell one thing from another is a key skill. A team of UK researchers has created software which has taught itself to recognise objects around it, with impressive accuracy. UK researchers have created software, called RadarCat, which can teach itself to recognise objects around it with impressive accuracy . Called the RadarCat, short for radar categorisation for input and interaction, the software scans the world around it uses radar to scan the world around it.