[HN Gopher] Imperceptible sensors can be printed directly on hum...
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Imperceptible sensors can be printed directly on human skin
Author : geox
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-05-24 11:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cam.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cam.ac.uk)
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Hello dystopian biological barcodes.
|
| Unknown to the baby and enforced by martial law.
| abathur wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I don't think the thing preventing this level of control and
| tracking from currently existing is the lack of technology.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| You are the one thinking of evil uses, not them
| Minor49er wrote:
| Historians, skeptics, and sci-fi authors must all be evil-
| minded megalomaniacs
| colonelpopcorn wrote:
| I can't think of a historian, skeptic, or sci-fi author
| who's had a level of power enough to disprove your
| statement.
| Minor49er wrote:
| What does level of power have to do with imagining
| possibilities?
| knome wrote:
| There's always L Ron Hubbard, but I'll assume he's a one
| off aberration, as very few sci-fi authors veered off
| into founding infamously belligerent religious cults.
|
| That said, the idea that people in power wouldn't think
| of ways to abuse pretty much any technology and that
| considering such things is some personal fault of
| @doublerabbit is quite the silly accusation for
| @iancmceachern to have made.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Hubbard is an example that proves the point, not a good
| dude.
|
| I wasn't comparing "people in power" to the parent
| commenter.
|
| I was comparing the study authors to the parent
| commenter.
|
| My point was, more globally, should we halt scientific
| progress because things could be used with bad intent to
| do bad? Where, and how, do we draw the line?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| 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.
| pizzaknife wrote:
| this is what im here for. hell yeah.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Glad I could help. I had to quit thinking about this
| article since I had too many product ideas or potential
| applications popping into my mind. Some were potentially
| useful.
| jjk166 wrote:
| We've had tattoos for thousands of years.
| astrange wrote:
| You already shed unique identifiers everywhere you go in the
| form of your DNA, and if someone cares they can pick them up.
| ozten wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Oof, fullscreen cookie popup without a clear 'no thanks',
| basically replaced the article for me. Unfortunate.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://archive.md/OWY0m
| robviren wrote:
| Dang, between this, LLMs, and our lives being increasingly
| digital The Onion strikes again.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoXQKumgCw
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you, fascinating.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Can't wait to see what Kyle "Qdot" Machulis does with this!
| mcswell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What do they sense? (contact, force, temperature, vibration,
| etc?)
| romseb wrote:
| 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.
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