A team of scientists have created a material that can 'feel' things and translate them into information just like humans.
Researchers in Pennsylvania, USA, have created a rubber-like material which 'acts like a brain'.
It's capable of taking in information from the real world, analysing it, and taking action on it. The scientists behind the discovery believe it will make engineering materials and robots even more intelligent by giving them physical 'senses'.
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Professor Ryan Harne, who led the Penn State University study, said that his team's invention is the first to allow any material to 'think' about what's happening around it.
Harne said: "We have created the first example of an engineering material that can simultaneously sense, think and act upon mechanical stress without requiring additional circuits to process such signals.
"The soft polymer material acts like a brain that can receive digital strings of information that are then processed, resulting in new sequences of digital information that can control reactions."
It might sound a bit techie, but Harne is calling it a "fundamental form of intelligence" because it means machines can use a similar thinking process to humans.
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"What makes humans smart is our means to observe and think about information we receive through our senses, reflecting on the relationship between that information and how we can react." The material his team created, he argues, can do the same thing.
Indeed, the material has hundreds of different uses as it can translate different inputs into outputs.
Harne and his team demonstrated that it could interpret 'mechanical force' such as in a factory or manufacturing plant and translate this into hard sums and data.
They also claim it can detect and interpret radio waves and use these to communicate through different light signals, or even be used in AI-powered search and rescue systems.
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