Robotics: A skin that survives fifty thousand stretches and a deep freeze

Robots are already being given artificial skin so they can feel what they touch, and most of it fails the same way: the soft gel doing the sensing dries out, drifts, or cracks after enough bending. Sealing it inside a protective layer sounds like the fix, but the seam between a stiff seal and a soft gel is exactly where the cracks start. A team at Qingdao University and Donghua University in China built a skin with no seam in it at all. A notched sample was stretched to three times its length fifty thousand...