Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Produce Cloacking Material for Touch

In the popular folktale, “The Princess and the Pea,” a young girl proves her princess-like sensitivity after a pea, inserted beneath 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds, ruins her night of sleep. But if she had slept atop a thin sheet of scientists’ new touch-cloaking nanomaterial, she would have slept like a rock.

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have created a material that sounds like something from a fictional tale: an elasto-mechanical unfeelability cloak. The polymer-based, scaffold-like structure can mask the presence of an object so it’s imperceptible to the human touch.

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