Back in 2012, a team of researchers from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, or KIT, were successful in creating pentamodes—mechanical metamaterials which behave similar to fluids. Today, another team of researchers have discovered these metamaterials have an interesting property: if used correctly, it can “cloak” any object from your sense of touch.
Here’s how the cloaking works: the nanomaterial, which is polymer-based and forms into a scaffold structure, can shape itself around any object, where it then disperses pressure around that object in a way that shields it from detection by human touch. A normal material would not be able to accomplish this. If you want a more in-depth explanation, here’s how the KIT researchers themselves described it on Mashable:
“[It] is a crystalline material structured with sub-micrometer accuracy. It consists of needle-shaped cones, whose tips meet. The size of the contact points is calculated precisely to reach the mechanical properties desired. In this way, a structure results, through which a finger or a measurement instrument cannot feel its way.”
Because of its nano design, the material is incredibly light, with its intriguing structure thanks to the 3D laser lithography courtesy of Nanoscribe.
The project is currently purely research—you can see their published results in the Nature Communications journal—but the nanomaterial could have interesting future applications, such as the creation of shoes you don’t even feel when you’re walking or sleeping bags that could shield you from rocks or twigs on the ground when camping.
Source Mashable
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