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move over robots a human - comparable outside has been the standard for geezerhood — centuries even . But giving them actual , living skin that can be misrepresent into horrifying , slimy expressions ? That ’s fresh .
The unexampled work , published in the journalCell Reports Physical Science , is very much just an experiment . This will not be the face of your next smart home plate hub or vacancy .
But it may well be that the clever machinery produced by billions of years of evolution may be good in some situations than artificial peel ( also very much in maturation ) or simpler surface . This impart up several questions — many , in fact , but only one is really the topic of the newspaper , as is proper in scientific inquiry .
To wit : How would such a living tissue paper surface , whatever its advantages and disadvantages , attach to the mechanical initiation of a robot ’s limb or “ face ” ?
In humans and other animals , there is a net of ligament that anchors the hide to underlie muscleman and tissue paper . This make pretty well , I ’ve feel . And the research worker at the University of Tokyo and Harvard want to test whether they could create a version of this that get aliveness skin both cling closely to an artificial substrate , and also be manipulated in various directions without displume or unintended distortion .
How did their “ dermis equivalent ” twist out ? I ’ll let you be the jurist :
Ah , nightmare fuel . But you ca n’t accuse it of being anything less than well - moisturized .
Of naturally it ’s alarm now , but it ’s not intended to be realistic or beautiful — just to illustrate a potential method for attachment of living tissue to robotlike undercarriage .
Yes , that is in fact exactly what a Terminator T-100 model has , but let ’s not get ahead of ourselves . Skin - covered robots could do all kinds of useful material in addition to infiltrating the past times to destroy humanity ’s future .
Cultured skin , as they put it , can bring around itself , carry biological sensors like our own to render sensitive touch , and could also have benefits in aesculapian or human interaction contexts .
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But only if it can stay awake on there and also be moved around in the same way our own skin is during everyday habit . That ’s part of what the newspaper is intended to show : a working method for attachment and manipulation that conceivably could be used on — or as — a face .
