Imperceptible sensors can be printed directly on human skin

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/imperceptible-sensors-made-from-electronic-spider-silk-can-be-printed-directly-on-human-skin

by geox • 2 years ago

94 36 2 years ago

cam.ac.uk

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

Hello dystopian biological barcodes.

Unknown to the baby and enforced by martial law.

abathur• 2 years ago

They are talking about printing something on a variety of substrates including skin.

We constantly shed skin. The powers-that-be in whatever dystopian mark-of-the-beast fantasy you're imagining would have to regularly reapply these sensors, so they wouldn't remain unknown for long.

Any power apparatus capable of regularly and forcibly applying these sensors is certainly capable of just forcibly tattooing (or microchipping) you.

fellowniusmonk• 2 years ago

Thank you. For 40 years I've been hearing every benign or ultimately useful piece of tech get labeled as the mark of the beast or a "sign of the end times", I'm completely over the supernatural evil garbage.

Tech can be misused and that's why democracy, privacy, etc. is crucial, but these people always make these weird/cheap/lazy, throwaway statements in a defeatist tone of predetermined supernatural evil. It's such learned helplessness.

Meanwhile many municipalities in modern countries have done practical things like banned facial recognition from use by law enforcement.

If it's a human source of evil we have human methods and forms of governance to address the potential issues, but these supernaturalist recommendations always seem to advocate that the solution is to vote in this one dude that is God's man.

40 years of this crap and they've been wrong or hyperbolic to the point of absurdity every damn time, all while eroding their own freedoms via the policies their chosen champions have passed any time a slightly real threat comes along.

more_corn• 2 years ago

They are temporary biodegradable health sensors. This is not a technology that leads to autocracy. If anyone wants that they just tattoo.

I’m not saying humans aren’t usually terrible, just that this particular technology doesn’t unlock any new or more nefarious terribleness.

BobaFloutist• 2 years ago

I don't think the thing preventing this level of control and tracking from currently existing is the lack of technology.

iancmceachern2• 2 years ago

You are the one thinking of evil uses, not them

Minor49er2• 2 years ago

Historians, skeptics, and sci-fi authors must all be evil-minded megalomaniacs

doodlebugging2• 2 years ago

Add me to that list of people who immediately thought of evil uses for this material.

It is a perfect material to enable mental torture. Years ago when I was a kid I had a newspaper route. From about 3 am to 5:30-6:00 am each morning I rolled newspapers and then walked or ran the route through my assigned neighborhood throwing those rolled newspapers wherever the customers had requested them to be in the morning.

One of the worst possible things that you could encounter along the route were spider webs. Many of these homes had large trees, hedges, etc that grew along sidewalks and spiders are experts at bridging wide gaps with thin tendrils of sticky web. I'm sure their workday started as soon as they detected a break in the web and didn't end until they ran out of food or mated and died. They were busy.

I learned to travel the worst parts of the route with a newspaper held vertically at arm's length in front of my face so that I minimized the chance that I would walk face-first into a web and trap the spider on the wrong side of the web. That had happened too many times and it was always disconcerting to feel the web clinging to your face while something alive is struggling to escape from underneath it right beside your nostril.

That's why with the first mention of the properties and diameter of this material the very first thought I had was an unpleasant memory of a hungry spider, frantically trying to escape his predicament and how this material would be most effective as a torture device used to give people the sensation that something is on their skin when in fact there is nothing there.

It would also be a way to tickle someone without ever touching them or to induce a feeling that things are crawling on them.

I personally can see the utility in this sensor string for the use cases noted in the article but I can also the very real potential for abuse.

jjk166• 2 years ago

We've had tattoos for thousands of years.

astrange2• 2 years ago

You already shed unique identifiers everywhere you go in the form of your DNA, and if someone cares they can pick them up.

ozten• 2 years ago

A stepping stone to fulldive VR would being able to stimulate my skin to think it is 10 degrees warmer than it actually is. You probably could achive that with limited and targeted application. I'd implant that system and have an artificial sun in my office.

astrange2• 2 years ago

I recommend getting a lot of really bright lights. It's the peripheral vision of brightness that seems to matter more than the temperature.

https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens

burnished• 2 years ago

Oof, fullscreen cookie popup without a clear 'no thanks', basically replaced the article for me. Unfortunate.

zelphirkalt• 2 years ago

Imagine, popups IRL, based on unlawful tracking of where you went, based on sensor info, from a sensor secretly printed onto your skin.

red-iron-pine• 2 years ago

secretly? brand it with a logo and people will go out of their way to get it.

some dude wandering around with SUPREME on his forehead that light up each time he shines a blacklight on it. and also happens to track everywhere he goes

donclark• 2 years ago

https://archive.md/OWY0m

robviren• 2 years ago

Dang, between this, LLMs, and our lives being increasingly digital The Onion strikes again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoXQKumgCw

DonHopkins2• 2 years ago

That will totally drive them over the edge, and they will start thinking that Biden sent the FBI to assassinate them with deadly force, under the cover of searching their house for top secret documents, that don't actually exist, and aren't even classified, but were totally legal for them to steal anyway, because they're absolutely immune, and above the law, and they would have immediately given them back, if the government had just asked in the first place!

rolandog• 2 years ago

These news will not sit well with the "the clothes are made out of textile microphones" people [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316918

Ah, wait, that's me.

Jerrrrry• 2 years ago

Thank you, fascinating.

kristopolous2• 2 years ago

This is a clear candidate for conspiracy theory peddlers. I wish people would write headlines better so these Internet fabulists aren't just given t-balls for their wild stories

standardUser• 2 years ago

The people who want to believe in nonsense conspiracies are not going to be deterred just because we exert a bunch of extra energy parsing our words just right.

kristopolous2• 2 years ago

The articles they link to are very few in number. It's like under 6 or so.

They snag on to small quotes and tiny threads and recycle them for decades. Fabrications like The Protocols from the late 1800s or the Rothchilds Waterloo story from the 1840s still get bandied about.

From Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy to the modern Alex Jones, it's actually just a few pages of misinterpreted empirical evidence, quotes without context or poorly written headlines

We should all be weary of adding something to that list.

DonHopkins2• 2 years ago

Can't wait to see what Kyle "Qdot" Machulis does with this!

mcswell• 2 years ago

Besides the nefarious uses, I can think of a number of good uses. One would be to detect ticks crawling up your body. My body is pretty good at detecting them--the hairs on my legs, for example, cause a tickle when a tick crawls by them. And if the tick takes a bite, I start to itch in many places (not just at the site of the bite). But not everyone is that sensitive to ticks crawling or biting, and given how many diseases they carry (not to mention AlphaGal allergy), this could be a good early warning system to have when hiking.

novia• 2 years ago

Is the idea for these sensors to be very temporary? Human skin is constantly flaking off, and it's supposed to do that, as defense against infection.

The bioelectronic fibres, which are repairable, can be simply washed away when they have reached the end of their useful lifetime, and generate less than a single milligram of waste: by comparison, a typical single load of laundry produces between 600 and 1500 milligrams of fibre waste.

Hmm.. so yes? Most people bathe at least a few times a week. Also, the fibre waste from laundry is also known as microplastics, aka the thing we've all already been concerned about. This will just add a bit more?

11Spades• 2 years ago

Maybe I just didn't read carefully enough, but I'm having a hard time understanding what the sensors are actually meant to detect. Is this a foundational technology for a suite of different sensors, or just used for heart-rate monitoring, or..?

stubish• 2 years ago

Yes. My reading is they are printing wires, and the sensor bit is science fiction. Maybe the actual sensors are external, picking up deformation or position of the printed gunk?

rkagerer• 2 years ago

What do they sense? (contact, force, temperature, vibration, etc?)

romseb• 2 years ago

The press release didn't mention it at all. This figure shows three possibilities: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-024-01174-4/figures/4

* Augmented touch perception via dual-ECG sensing with person-i wearing bioelectronic fibre arrays and person-ii without. * A breathable skin-gated OECT on a fingertip * Dual-modal sensing for augmented perception of mist pulses with acidic, alkaline and neutral compositions distinguished through colorimetric and electrical readouts.

That is amazing.

Imperceptible sensors can be printed directly on human skin

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