Tag Archive for 'Sense of touch'

Schulz et al. examined the whiskers that cover Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) trunks and found that they are geometrically and mechanically tailored to facilitate tactile perception by encoding contact location in the amplitude and frequency of the vibrotactile signal felt at the whisker base. Image credit: Schulz et al., doi: 10.1126/science.adx8981.

Remarkable Sense of Touch in Elephant’s Trunk Isn’t Just about Muscles or Nerves: Study

Feb 17, 2026 by News Staff

Keratin composites enable animals to hike with hooves, fly with feathers, and sense with skin. Mammalian whiskers are elongated keratin rods attached to...

Chen et al. carried out two studies: the first, a human study assessing fingertip sensitivity to tactile cues from buried objects; the second, a robotic experiment using a tactile-equipped robotic arm and a Long Short-Term Memory model to detect object presence. Image credit: Gemini AI.

Humans Have Form of ‘Remote Touch,’ Scientists Claim

Nov 10, 2025 by News Staff

Humans possess the ability to sense objects without direct contact, a sense that some animals have, according to new research. Chen et al. carried out...

The versatility of somatosensation arises from heterogeneous dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons. However, soma transcriptomes of individual human (h)DRG neurons -- critical information to decipher their functions -- are lacking due to technical difficulties. In their new study, Yu et al. isolated somata from individual hDRG neurons and conducted deep RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to detect, on average, over 9,000 unique genes per neuron, and they identified 16 neuronal types.

Neuroscientists Identify 16 Neuronal Types Involved in Human Sense of Touch

Nov 6, 2024 by News Staff

New research led by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, Karolinska Institute and Linköping University provides a landscape view of the human...