A swap of a single atom can change how a smooth surface feels
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The human fingertip can distinguish between materials that have minuscule chemical differences – even a substitution as small as a single atom.
Generally, what we feel with our fingers are physical bumps in a material’s surface structure. Charles Dhong at the University of Delaware and his colleagues set out to find whether it would be possible to feel a chemical difference in which the internal molecular structures of two materials slightly vary but their surfaces are equally smooth.
They did this by taking a …
source: newscientist.com