ScienceDaily: Matter & Energy News

In the quest to build smart skin that mimics the sensing capabilities of natural skin, ionic skins have shown significant advantages. They're made of flexible, biocompatible hydrogels that use ions to carry an electrical charge. These hydrogels can generate voltages when touched, but scientists did not clearly understand how -- until a team of researchers devised a unique experiment.

An international group of experts says the production of new plastics should be capped to solve the plastic pollution problem. The authors argue that all other measures won't suffice to keep up with the pace of plastic production and releases.

Researchers have designed a tunable physical reservoir device based on the dielectric relaxation at an electrode-ionic liquid interface. Physical reservoir computing (PRC), which relies on the transient response of physical systems, is an attractive machine learning framework that can perform high-speed processing of time-series signals at low power.