Tour De Force: Sweat Patch Takes A Licking, Keeps On Sticking
Kristin Kloberdanz
September 11, 2019
Serious physical training is all about making the body tougher and figuring out the weak points. When GE Research engineers sent the first generation of their adhesive sweat patch to a U.S. Air Force Academy boot camp simulation in March 2018, cadets were encouraged to go hard on the Band-Aid-like wearable device designed to wirelessly detect specific levels of electrolytes in their sweat.
"Scientists in Canada found a way to decode what people see by monitoring their brain waves, their colleagues in Japan created a ghostly LED light the size of a lentil that floats through the air on ultrasound, and a team in the U.S. is learning from squids and octopuses how to build the perfect camouflage. But there's no place to hide from progress.
This week we learned about a facial recognition system for cows, a bacterium that consumes toxic metals and poops out gold without poisoning itself, and a live worm that lives inside a computer and can balance a pole on the tip of its tail. Together with the car now orbiting Earth, this week got a lot of mileage out of science.