What’s the News: Keeping track of what’s happening inside the body often requires a great deal of equipment outside it: Just think of the tangle of sensors in any hospital room. Now, though, engineers have developed an ultra-thin electrical circuit that can be pasted onto the skin just like a temporary tattoo. Once it’s served its purpose, you can simply peel it off. These patches could be provide a simpler, less restrictive way to monitor a patient’s vital signs, or even let wearers command a computer with speech or other slight movements.

How the Heck:

The researchers designed the circuit to match the mechanical properties of skin, meaning it can stretch, scrunch, and bend just like skin does. That’s no easy task, given that electronics aren’t usually elastic.
To do this, the researchers bent the circuit’s wires into a squiggly shape (see the photo above) that can expand and shrink along with the skin. They also shrank various circuit components to the minute size of the natural bumps and grooves of human skin. Since they wanted to prove that the circuit could have a range of applications, the team included all sorts of different components, ...