Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
It is sort of an electronics rule 34 that if something occurs, someone needs to sense it. [Bblorgggg], for reasons that aren't immediately obvious, needs to sense ants moving over trees. No kidding. How are you going to do that? His answer was to use graphene.
Actually, his super sensitive sensors mix graphene in Silly Putty, an unlikely combination that he tried after reading (on Hackaday, no less) about similar experiments at Trinity College resulting in Gputty. The Gputty was highly sensitive to pressure, and so it appears is his DIY version called Goophene. At Trinity they claimed to be able to record the footsteps of a spider, so detecting ant stomping didn't seem too far-fetched. You can see a video of the result, below.
Silly Putty, which is just silicone putty, gives the graphene an unusually large dynamic range. That is, it can detect large pressures (say, a finger pressing) and still detect a very faint pressure (like your heart beating through the finger). Apparently, the graphene lines up to become pretty conductive in the putty and then any deformation causes the resistance to go up. However, when the pressure subsides, the graphene lines back up.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/01/23/diy-graphene-putty-makes-super-sensitive-sensor/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tara Li on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:46PM
I could see this being used for robot hands/fingers, giving them the option of a good grip or an extremely light touch. And robot skin. Of course, other already known techs may already be in use for these purposes.