Swimmers find their stroke in a hirsute wetsuit

摘要

A Wetsuit made from a hairy artificial skin could enable competition swimmers to hone their front crawl or breaststroke. By making swimmers hypersensitive to the flow of water over their bodies, the idea is to allow them to modify their stroke to minimise the turbulent flows that slow them down. Ryuta Okazaki and colleagues at the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo, Japan, have created a skin that mimics the way human hairfollicles add to our skin's ability to detect sensation. Human skin has short, curly hairs sprouting out of sockets called follicles. Receptors deep in each follicle fire nerve signals when hairs bend - for instance, if air or water flows over or the skin is touched.