The Human Touch

Think science isn't very "touchy feely?" Think again. 

Researchers, engineers and students in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Biomechatronics Lab are building artificial limbs to be more tactile or sensitive to touch.

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the team led by mechanical engineer, Veronica J. Santos, Ph.D. is creating a touch language translatable by computers and humans. The researchers test robotic touch with mechanical pressure sensors that interact with objects of various shapes, sizes and textures. With cutting edge instrumentation, Santos' team is able to translate touch interaction into computer data.

Santos' results will be used to for a formula or algorithm that allows the computer to identify patterns among the items in its library of tested experiences and things it has never felt before. This work will help researchers further develop artificial haptic (sense of touch) skills and provide robots and human prostheses with the "human touch."

Go Science!

Scientists at Stony Brook University in New York have found that the bonds that salt forms with chlorine (making table salt) are not set in stone (er salt). Instead of atoms lining up in cubic form, with each sodium forming a single chemical bond with a chlorine as they do under normal conditions, they form much more exotic structures under extreme heat and pressure. 

When salt was squeezed under high pressure between two diamonds and then heated with lasers, the sodium and chlorine atoms bonded in new ways. For example, a single sodium atom might attach to three chlorine atoms or five or seven. Or two sodium atoms might link up with three chlorines. This unusual bonding changes salt’s normal structure. Its atoms form amazing shapes never before seen in table salt. 

Artem Organov, Ph.D., one of the Stony Brook chemists explained that the high temperature and pressure used by his team may replicate extreme conditions deep inside stars and planets. In fact, it's possible that the experiment's unusual metallic and conducting structures occur throughout the universe.

Scientists have long speculated that the exchange of electrons during ionic bonding would be altered under high pressure and temperature. Instead of just attached to one atom, electrons would move from atom to atom and form shared bonds like what took place in the Stony Brook University salt experiments. New metallic bonds made it possible for sodium and chlorine atoms to share electrons in weird ways. Go science!