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The ‘e-skin’ is a soft, flexible sensor with integrated circuits.Credit: Jiancheng Lai and Weichen Wang of Bao Research Group at Stanford University
‘Electronic skin’ mimics our sense of touch
A new type of electronic skin mimics the process that causes a finger, toe or limb to move when poked or scalded. The soft material senses temperature and pressure, and turns the information into electrical pulses. When wired up to a rat’s brain, pressing the e-skin makes the animal’s leg twitch. Eventually, e-skin technology could give prosthetic-limb wearers a sense of touch.
Biggest plume spewing from Saturn moon
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted Saturn’s moon Enceladus spraying out a huge plume of very cold water vapour, far bigger than any previously seen there. The enormous cloud could carry the chemical ingredients of life: the salty ocean that lies beneath Enceladus’s icy surface is a possible haven for organisms, which could be sustained by hydrothermal vents. The JWST discovery provides more grist for a possible NASA mission to Enceladus. One proposal involves an autonomous snake robot that could slither beneath the ice.
New Thai leaders face innovation challenges
Significant challenges lie ahead for Thailand’s youth-oriented Move Forward Party, which was elected on Sunday after almost a decade of military-dominated rule. The new government has inherited a strategy known as ‘Thailand 4.0,’ a push to modernize the Thai economy and promote innovation. “The workforce is simply not ready,” says southeast Asia specialist Mark Cogan. Another issue: the military’s strong influence on science programmes is expected to continue.
Features & opinion
Five projects tackling AI’s diversity crisis
The field of artificial intelligence (AI) needs to promptly address its biases to stop them from oozing into the resulting technologies. “Beneath this veneer of ‘oh, AI is the future, and we have all these sparkly, nice things’, both AI academia and industry are fundamentally conservative,” says scientific consultant Sabine Weber, who co-organized the first Queer in AI workshop at a prestigious machine-learning conference in 2018. Five AI scientists explain how they are fighting for change, including through improving conference accessibility and creating mentorship programmes and local researcher networks.
Futures: The Nana inheritance
A grandmother gets the last laugh — and eternal ownership of her delicious recipe for gyros — in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.
Five best science books this week
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes an exquisitely crafted history of watchmaking, a disturbing look at bias in AI and a well-travelled, thoughtful study of wildlife recoveries.
Podcast: A galaxy from the cosmic dark ages
Observations with the JWST have confirmed that one of the most distant galaxies, JD1, hails from the cosmic dark ages, only 500 million years after the Big Bang. JD1 had been discovered about a decade ago but, without JWST, it had been difficult to do more than speculate about the faint red blob’s nature. “We would spend entire nights trying to get the faintest signature possible,” astrophysicist Guido Roberts-Borsani tells the Nature Podcast. “Now you can do it in just an hour with James Webb. You can get a wealth of information that we could only dream of.”
Nature Podcast | 30 min listen
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