The titles of scientific papers can be a bit intimidating. For example, I’m currently reading “3D multifunctional integumentary membranes for spatiotemporal cardiac measurements and stimulation across the entire epicardium”.

In other words: electric heart socks.

A team of scientists led by John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a web of electronics that wraps around a living heart and measures everything from temperature to electrical activity. It’s an ultra-thin and skin-like sheath, which looks like a grid of tiny black squares connected by S-shaped wires. Its embrace is snug and form-fitting, but gentle and elastic. It measures the heart’s beats, without ever impeding them.

Its goal is to monitor the heart in unprecedented detail, and to spot the