Skip to main content

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

3 comments

New AI Patch Reads Your Heart Within Milliseconds and Saves Your Life Before You Even Know Something Is Wrong

A new breakthrough from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering is bringing science fiction closer to reality. Researchers have developed an ultra-thin, skin-like computing patch that can analyze health data using artificial intelligence directly on the human body—within milliseconds and without sending data to external servers.

Unlike today’s smartwatches and fitness bands, which only collect data and send it elsewhere for processing, this new device thinks for itself. It performs AI-based analysis right where the data is generated, potentially transforming how doctors monitor and treat life-threatening conditions.

The study, published in Nature Electronics, was developed by researchers at the University of Chicago PME in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory.

Why Current Wearable Devices Are Not Enough

Modern wearable devices like smartwatches can measure heart rate, steps, oxygen levels, and even ECG signals. However, they have one major limitation: they do not analyze this data in real time on the body.

Instead, the information is sent to cloud servers or smartphones, where algorithms process it and send results back. This delay may seem small—just a few seconds—but in critical medical situations, even a slight lag can be dangerous.

For example, in conditions like ventricular fibrillation, the heart’s electrical activity becomes chaotic. The rhythm can become fatal within seconds. In such cases, waiting for remote computing can cost precious time.

Researchers realized that to truly respond to emergencies, computing must happen instantly—on the body itself.

A “Personal AI Doctor” on Your Skin

Professor Sihong Wang from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering described the vision behind the work:

“The future that we're trying to realize is to make wearable and implantable devices smarter. It's helping people have a personal, instantaneous doctor integrated into their devices.”

The idea is simple but powerful: instead of just collecting health data, the device should understand it immediately and respond like a tiny AI doctor attached to your skin.

This shift moves wearables from passive trackers to active decision-makers.

The Challenge: Making Electronics Stretch Like Skin

To achieve this vision, researchers needed to build electronics that are flexible, stretchable, and safe for human skin.

Over several years, Wang’s team has worked on creating electronics that behave like human tissue. Their earlier innovations included stretchable transistor arrays and even flexible display technologies.

But the new project required something even more advanced: a stretchable neuromorphic computing circuit. This means a network of artificial “brain-like” components that can process information and run AI models directly on the body.

However, building such a system was extremely difficult.

Why Traditional Chips Don’t Work on Skin

Standard computer chips are rigid, fragile, and require high-temperature manufacturing processes. Human skin, on the other hand, is soft, flexible, and constantly moving.

To bridge this gap, researchers used a special type of transistor called an organic electrochemical transistor. Unlike silicon chips, these devices use both electrical signals and ion movement through a gel-like material.

This gel gives each transistor a memory-like property, similar to how brain synapses store information. In simple terms, the device can “learn” and “remember” patterns in data.

But there was a problem: the gel material is unstable. It behaves almost like a liquid, which makes it difficult to control and manufacture at scale.

A Smart Material Solution

To solve this challenge, the research team developed a new polymer gel that can be precisely patterned using ultraviolet light. This innovation allowed them to “freeze” the gel into stable structures without losing its flexible properties.

With this method, they were able to manufacture about 10,000 transistors per square centimeter—dense enough to support complex AI computations on a small patch of skin.

According to graduate researcher Zixuan Zhao, the challenge was not just engineering but rethinking computing itself:

“In hardware, a neural network weight is not just a number. It’s a material—with variability, history, and physical limits.”

This means that instead of working with perfect digital numbers like in software, the system must deal with real physical materials that can change over time. The breakthrough was designing computation that still works reliably despite these natural imperfections.

Saving Lives with Instant AI Decisions

To demonstrate the real-world potential of the technology, the team tested it using medical data related to ventricular fibrillation.

This condition causes chaotic electrical waves in the heart. Normally, treatment involves delivering a strong defibrillator shock. However, scientists are exploring more precise methods—predicting and stopping abnormal waves before they spread.

The problem is speed. The heart’s electrical signals move extremely fast, so any analysis must be completed in milliseconds.

The new skin-like computing patch was able to process this information directly on the body without sending it to an external system.

Using real cardiac data from a donor human heart, the system identified electrical wave patterns with 99.6% accuracy, even when stretched to 1.5 times its original size.

This is a major milestone because it shows the device can remain accurate even under physical stress and movement—something essential for real-world medical use.

Predicting Heart Disease Risk in Real Time

In another test, the researchers used the system to run a neural network that analyzed multiple health indicators, including:

  • Cholesterol levels

  • Blood sugar

  • Maximum heart rate

  • ECG readings

The system was able to predict heart attack risk with 83.5% accuracy.

This suggests that future versions of the device could continuously monitor a patient and warn them of danger before symptoms even appear.

Toward a Fully Connected Health System

The research team envisions this technology as part of a larger health ecosystem. Instead of separate devices for sensing, computing, and communication, everything would be integrated into one flexible system.

Professor Sihong Wang’s lab is now working on combining:

  • Stretchable sensors

  • On-body AI computing

  • Wireless communication systems

The goal is to create a complete body-worn platform that can sense, analyze, and respond in real time.

As researcher Fangfang Xia from Argonne National Laboratory explained:

“Instead of sending data away to a remote server, we can begin making sense of it right where life is happening.”

What This Means for the Future of Medicine

This innovation could change the way healthcare works in several important ways:

  • Emergency conditions could be detected instantly

  • Patients could receive faster and more precise treatment

  • Doctors could monitor patients continuously without delays

  • Medical devices could become lightweight, flexible, and invisible on the skin

In the long term, such systems could act like a constant health companion, always watching for early warning signs of disease.

Conclusion

The skin-like AI computing patch developed by researchers at the University of Chicago PME represents a major step toward merging biology and electronics. By bringing artificial intelligence directly onto the human body, the device eliminates the delay between sensing and decision-making.

Instead of relying on distant servers, future medical systems may one day think, analyze, and respond instantly—right on our skin.

This could mark the beginning of a new era in healthcare: one where technology does not just observe the human body, but actively helps protect it in real time.

Reference: Li, S., Zhao, Z., Weires, M. et al. A large-scale stretchable neuromorphic circuit for on-body edge computing. Nat Electron (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01639-8

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

For years, scientists believed that adding even one qubit (a unit of quantum information) to a black hole needed energy. This was based on the idea that a black hole’s entropy must increase with more information, which means it must gain energy. But a new study by Jonah Kudler-Flam and Geoff Penington changes that thinking. They found that quantum information can be teleported into a black hole without adding energy or increasing entropy . This works through a process called black hole decoherence , where “soft” radiation — very low-energy signals — carry information into the black hole. In their method, the qubit enters the black hole while a new pair of entangled particles (like Hawking radiation) is created. This keeps the total information balanced, so there's no violation of the laws of physics. The energy cost only shows up when information is erased from the outside — these are called zerobits . According to Landauer’s principle, erasing information always needs energy. But ...
3 comments
Read more

Black Holes That Never Dies

Black holes are powerful objects in space with gravity so strong that nothing can escape them. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can slowly lose energy by giving off tiny particles. This process is called Hawking radiation . Over time, the black hole gets smaller and hotter, and in the end, it disappears completely. But new research by Menezes and his team shows something different. Using a theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) , they studied black holes with quantum corrections. In their model, the black hole does not vanish completely. Instead, it stops shrinking when it reaches a very small size. This leftover is called a black hole remnant . They also studied something called grey-body factors , which affect how much energy escapes from a black hole. Their findings show that the black hole cools down and stops losing mass once it reaches a minimum mass . This new model removes the idea of a “singularity” at the center of the black hole and gives us a better ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Planetary Movements Might Explain Sunspot Cycles and Solar Phenomena

Sunspots, dark patches on the Sun's surface, follow a cycle of increasing and decreasing activity every 11 years. For years, scientists have relied on the dynamo model to explain this cycle. According to this model, the Sun's magnetic field is generated by the movement of plasma and the Sun's rotation. However, this model does not fully explain why the sunspot cycle is sometimes unpredictable. Lauri Jetsu, a researcher, has proposed a new approach. Jetsu’s analysis, using a method called the Discrete Chi-square Method (DCM), suggests that planetary movements, especially those of Earth, Jupiter, and Mercury, play a key role in driving the sunspot cycle. His theory focuses on Flux Transfer Events (FTEs), where the magnetic fields of these planets interact with the Sun’s magnetic field. These interactions could create the sunspots and explain other solar phenomena like the Sun’s magnetic polarity reversing every 11 years. The Sun, our closest star, has been a subject of scient...
Post a Comment
Read more