Fingers of Science to Start 2025

Another year, another round of close-up photos of scientists holding small things in their rubber-gloved fingers. Nothing says science like a tiny piece of magic held by disembodied, rubber-gloved fingers, shoved right in front of the camera. Behold the fruits of human exploration:

Above image: Photostimulable polymer meta-surface - Jens Meyer University of Jena - Feb 2024

Airy cellulose from a 3D printer - Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology - Apr 2024

Healable cathode material - David Baillot at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering - Mar 2024

Precious metals extracted from discarded electronics - Fred Zwicky at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - Mar 2024

Synthetic mucus - Jessica Kramer for University of Utah - Mar 2024

2D semiconductor material by Xiangfeng Duan - UCLA Dehui Zhang - Apr 2024

A bag of extracted contaminants from an old pizza box - Idaho National Laboratory - Apr 2024

Prototype finger with rigid bones and flexible flesh - Adrian Alberola - Apr 2024

Zinc-lignin battery - Thor Balkhed Linköping University - May 2024

A bead of space glass, glass made in space - Phoenix Pleasant ORNL, USDOE - 2024

Smart bioelectronic bandage - Wei Gao California Institute of Technology - Jun 2024

Fingers For All

Gallery of close-up photos of scientists holding small things in their rubber-gloved fingers. I wish I could articulate my fascination with these pictures, something about the essence of discovery, the seed of wonder? It's close up so it's under enhanced scrutiny by the viewer. Maybe it's the difference between this little thing being a big deal, and yet being so tiny. What's the difference between a photograph of the Large Hadron Collider and a photograph of this "artificial fairy" above? You can hold it in your hands, and not just your hands, in between your fingers. And also it's being held, controlled, protected, by the very hands that made it. Maybe just because it's the scientists fingers, not their face or their lab coat or their million dollar petaflopping supercomputers,  but their fingers. The physical products of scientific endeavor, the pinnacle of human technology, being held by the most simple piece of "technology" on this Earth -- the human hand.  

Above image: Artificial fairy - Hao Zeng, Jianfeng Yang, Jianfeng Yang at Tampere University - 2023

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-fairy-like-robot-flies-power.html

Gnat Robot includes a 2 mg gyroscope, 3 mg microprocessor, and 1 mg visual optic flow sensor - Fuller, Yu & Talwekar U of Wash - 2022 [link]

Graphene device grown on a silicon carbide substrate chip - Jess Hunt-Ralston at Georgia Institute of Technology - 2022 [link]

Printable transparent plastic - James Ponder Georgia Tech - 2022 [link]

Recycling batteries - Chen Feng and Marilyn Sargent at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - 2023 [link]

Electricity-generating laminate for ambient energy harvesting - University of Melbourne - 2023 [link]

Enzymatic recycling platform efficiently deconstructs raw PET plastic - Dennis Schroeder NREL - 2022 [link]

Emma Rothkopf 20 microliter sample at Brown University - 2023 [link]

Thermally resistant copper sandwich - Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering - 2023 [link]

Smart bandage by Caltech - 2023 [link]

Prototype fuel cell wrapped in fleece - Fussenegger Lab at ETH Zurich - 2023 [link]

Covalent organic framework material - Gustavo Raskosky at Rice University - 2023 [link]

Scientist Fingers

Implantable Sensor - Shangbin Liu Penn State Tsinghua University - 2022

Researchers developed a flexible, implantable sensor that can continuously monitor nitric oxide in the knee of a rabbit. The gas may indicate the onset of damage-induced osteoarthritis. Shangbin Liu Penn State Tsinghua University, 2022 [link]

Rhizosphere-on-a-chip - Carlos Jones, ORNL, US Dept of Energy - 2022 [link]

Single-Crystal Organometallic Perovskite Optical Fiber - Dr Lei Su at Queen Mary University of London - 2022 [link]

Recycled Plastic - Patrick Campbell University of Colorado Boulder - 2022 [link]

Ionic Circuit - Woo-Bin Jung Harvard SEAS - 2022 [link]

800,000 Lab-grown Brain Cells Play Pong - Cortical Labs - 2022 [link]

Single-cell electrorotation microfluidic device - Texas A and M Engineering - 2022 [link]

Spectrometer on a chip - Oregon State and Aalto University - 2022 [link]

Programmable bacteria electronics - Brandon Martin at Rice University - 2022 [link]

Hydrophobic film - Sahar Babaeipour at Aalto University - 2022 [link]

Fragment of Winchcombe meteorite - The Trustees of the Natural History Museum of London - 2022 [link]

All-perovskite tandem solar cell with power conversion efficiency of 27.4% - Aaron Demeter at University of Toronto Engineering - 2022 [link]

Anterior teeth with a huge dental calculus deposit from Copper Age Italy 3.000 BC - Andrea Quagliariello - 2022 [link]

Hydrogen-substituted graphdiyne coupled with a single-crystal copper catalyst - Vincent Tung, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology - 2022 [link]

Let's Accept It

Scientists craft living human skin for robots

Jun 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-scientists-craft-human-skin-robots.html

Robotic finger skin-like texture with water-repellent and self-healing functions.

"The finger looks slightly 'sweaty' straight out of the culture medium,"

"Since the finger is driven by an electric motor, it is also interesting to hear the clicking sounds of the motor in harmony with a finger that looks just like a real one."

Interesting? Sounds like the deepest horrors of mankind to me. 

"With that method, you have to have the hands of a skilled artisan who can cut and tailor the skin sheets," says Takeuchi. "To efficiently cover surfaces with skin cells, we established a tissue molding method to directly mold skin tissue around the robot, which resulted in a seamless skin coverage on a robotic finger."

Skin Sheets.

When wounded, the crafted skin could even self-heal like humans' with the help of a collagen bandage, which gradually morphed into the skin and withstood repeated joint movements.

It heals itself. 

"I think living skin is the ultimate solution to give robots the look and touch of living creatures since it is exactly the same material that covers animal bodies," says Takeuchi.

And there you have it.

via University of Tokyo: Shoji Takeuchi, Living skin on a robot, Matter (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2022.05.019

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2022.05.019

Image credit: Robotic finger covered with human living skin self heals, Shoji Takeuchi, University of Tokyo, 2022

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-scientists-craft-human-skin-robots.html

Post Script - Fingers of Science:

I don't know where this came from, but I am compelled to archive pictures of scientists holding tiny things in between their fingers. Nothing says science like a tiny piece of magic held by disembodied, rubber-gloved fingers, shoved right in front of the camera. Behold the fruits of human exploration:

Photonic Processor - June Sang Lee University of Oxford - 2022

A transducer combining liquid crystal elastomers with a thermoelectrical device provides advantages like active cooling and regenerative energy harvesting for soft robotics. Credit: Soft Machines Lab, Carnegie Mellon University [link]

Wearable Thermoelectric Device - Han et al University of Washington Advanced Energy Materials - 2022

SbSI and SbSI-Sb2S3 Photovoltaic Devices - Ryosuke Nishikubo - 2022

hectoSTAR probe - Eunah Ko shows University of Michigan - 2022

Film coated in thermoelectric ink - KTH Royal Institute of Technology - 2022

Double whammy, in the wild.