Self-Healing Plastic 'Skin' Points Way to New Prosthetics

Basically, researches in California may have found a new prosthetic version of our skin. It's a flexible, electrically conductive, and self healing polymer. It's actually really cool. 

This polymer is a result from a miniboom in "epidermal electronics" which is the production of circuits thin and flexible enough to be attached to skin or to provide sensory for prosthetic limbs. The problem with what they were making is that the silicon they were using was brittle so they had other researchers do some investigating.

Chemists were more interested in self healing polymers that would repair itself when a scientists applied heat, shone a light, or held the edges together.

Both of these technologies were combined into created this fake skin by Chemical Engineer Zhenan Bao of Sanford University and explored this concept. A big problem they ran into was all the self-healing had low bulk electrical conductivities and would have rendered the use of electrical sensors. To fix this, they added nickel atoms into the polymer. Essentially creating a prosthetic skin. Super cool.

Here's a link if you would like to read more: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/11/self-healing-plastic-skin-points.html