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

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Scientists Create an Artificial “Sensory Cell” That Could Give Prosthetic Hands a Sense of Touch

Imagine picking up a fragile glass. Your fingers automatically adjust their grip—strong enough to prevent the glass from slipping, but gentle enough to avoid breaking it. You do not consciously calculate the pressure. Your skin and nervous system handle it almost instantly.

Now, scientists are trying to recreate this remarkable ability in machines.

Researchers at Aarhus University have developed a tiny artificial sensor inspired by the way human sensory cells convert touch into electrical signals. The technology could eventually help prosthetic hands detect physical contact and, potentially, allow users to actually feel what their artificial limbs are touching.

The breakthrough was reported in the journal Advanced Functional Materials in a study titled “Bio-Inspired Artificial Ionic Mechanoreceptor.”

How Human Skin Turns Touch Into Electrical Signals

Human touch is far more sophisticated than it appears.

When you press your fingertip against an object, mechanical forces affect specialized sensory cells in your skin. Tiny channels in these cells respond to the force by allowing electrically charged particles, or ions, to move.

This movement changes the electrical state of the cell and generates a signal that travels through the nervous system toward the brain.

The brain then interprets these signals as sensations such as pressure, contact and movement.

This process happens extremely quickly and continuously. As you hold an object, your nervous system receives information about how much force your fingers are applying and helps you adjust your grip.

For engineers, this biological system offers an extraordinary example of how mechanical information can be transformed into electrical information.

Rassoul Tabassian, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering at Aarhus University, believes this process could provide important inspiration for future robotic and prosthetic technologies.

The goal of his research group is to understand some of the fundamental principles behind biological touch and reproduce them using artificial materials.

A Tiny Sensor Inspired by Human Sensory Cells

The researchers have now developed their first major prototype.

The sensor is made from a soft, silicone-like material and is roughly the size of a small lentil. Despite its tiny size, it can detect mechanical contact and convert that touch into an electrical potential.

The sensor is designed around a simple but important idea: moving ions can generate an electrical signal.

Inside the device are tiny chambers connected through a microscopic channel. These chambers contain salt water, which is filled with electrically charged particles.

When the sensor experiences mechanical stimulation, the movement of the fluid and ions changes the electrical balance inside the device. This produces an electrical signal that can be measured.

The approach is inspired by the fundamental mechanism used by biological sensory cells.

However, the researchers are not attempting to reproduce a human sensory cell exactly.

A biological sensory cell is enormously complicated, containing numerous molecular structures and biochemical processes. Instead, the team has identified some of the most important principles involved in biological touch and recreated them in a much simpler artificial system.

Why Existing Prosthetic Sensors Are Not Enough

Modern prosthetic hands can already contain sophisticated sensors.

These systems can detect pressure, contact and other information about the environment. This allows a prosthetic device to respond to objects around it.

But there is a major limitation.

The person wearing the prosthesis usually cannot directly feel the information detected by those sensors.

The sensor may know that an object has been touched, but that information does not automatically become a natural sensation in the user's nervous system.

This is one of the biggest challenges researchers are trying to solve in the development of next-generation prosthetic limbs.

The Aarhus University team believes its approach could eventually provide a new way of connecting artificial sensors with the nervous system.

Instead of simply detecting pressure and sending conventional electronic signals to an external computer, the researchers want the artificial sensor to generate signals that are more closely inspired by the body's own sensory mechanisms.

The Sensor Has Already Detected Touch and a Pulse

The first prototype is still at an early stage, but experiments have demonstrated several capabilities.

The sensor can detect a light touch. Researchers have also used it to detect the pulse produced by a blood vessel in the wrist.

When attached to a soft prosthetic hand, the sensor can recognize when the artificial finger is touched.

The electrical response can then be measured using laboratory equipment.

These demonstrations do not mean that the prosthetic hand can already provide a natural sense of touch. Instead, they show that the basic sensing mechanism works and can transform mechanical stimulation into an electrical signal.

That is an important step toward the researchers' longer-term goal.

The Biggest Challenge: Connecting It to Nerves

For the technology to eventually provide a meaningful sensation, simply detecting touch is not enough.

The electrical signal produced by the artificial sensor must eventually become strong and suitable enough to interact with the nervous system.

According to the researchers, the generated voltage needs to exceed a threshold of roughly 20 millivolts to trigger a signal in a nerve cell.

The current prototype does not yet achieve the complete process required for direct neural stimulation.

Increasing the signal strength is therefore one of the team's major goals.

Researchers will also need to understand how the sensor can safely and reliably communicate with biological nerves. This is a highly complex problem because the human nervous system is extremely sensitive and operates through precisely controlled electrical and chemical processes.

From Artificial Skin to Artificial Touch

The potential applications extend beyond simply making prosthetic hands more advanced.

If scientists can eventually develop artificial sensors that communicate directly with nerves, prosthetic users could potentially receive sensory information from their artificial limbs.

A person might one day be able to distinguish between different levels of pressure or detect when an object is being touched without having to rely entirely on vision.

Such technology could also contribute to future soft robots and robotic systems that need to interact safely with humans and their surroundings.

However, the researchers emphasize that this future is still several years away.

The current device is a laboratory prototype rather than a finished medical technology.

The next stages will involve improving the electrical signal, testing the technology more extensively and investigating how it could interact with living nervous systems. The researchers expect this process to involve experimental studies before any potential human applications are considered.

A Small Sensor With a Much Bigger Goal

The human sense of touch may seem ordinary because we experience it every second. But beneath the skin, an intricate biological system is constantly converting mechanical forces into electrical information that the brain can understand.

Researchers at Aarhus University are now attempting to reproduce one fundamental part of that process using a tiny, soft artificial sensor.

The device is still far from giving a prosthetic hand a fully natural sense of touch. But by borrowing a key idea from biology—using the movement of charged ions to generate electrical signals—the researchers have demonstrated a new approach to artificial sensing.

If future versions can produce stronger signals and safely communicate with the nervous system, today's simple touch sensor could become an important building block for prosthetic limbs that do more than move like human hands—they could eventually feel like them.

Reference: M. Akbari, J. Don, L. A. N. Pedersen, J. Noee, and R. Tabassian, “ Bio-Inspired Artificial Ionic Mechanoreceptor.” Advanced Functional Materials (2026): e77916. https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.77916

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