Remember the movie The Fly? No not the original, but the cool, 1986 remake starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. Goldblum's scientist character, Seth Brundle, is trying to figure out how to teleport humans from one place to another, but keeps failing (at one point his machines turn a Baboon inside out). Then Brundle realizes—after a bedroom romp with Davis's character—that his machine is failing because he hasn't told it enough about the nature of human flesh to get it right on the other side.

Now, it seems real-world researchers are figuring out human flesh and while they won't be helping us teleport any time soon, the Chinese news service Xinhua is reporting that Keio University Researchers have developed robot skin material that feels just like the real thing.

Like real skin, this material, developed by Robotics professor Takashi Maeno and his research team at Keio University, has multiple layers. So there's a centimeter-thick-dermis covered by an ultra-thin layer of "epidermis"—really urethane. Researchers even said that most people who touch the material think it feels like human skin.

This sounds cool. But Xinhua News's proposed application (or perhaps they got this from Professor Maeno) is to cover a robotic hand with the robo-flesh so it can do "remote-teleoperated breast exams." Pardon me? I can hear the sound of a woman slapping away a robotic hand right now.

[via Xinhuanet Online]

Thanks to Robotics expert Lance Ulanoff for this post!

Note: The picture posted here is just a humanoid robot--not robot skin material.