#finger

#finger

The Benefits of Wet Wrinkly FingersSoak in a bathtub long enough, or go swimming, or wash your dishes by hand, and sooner or later you'll get wrinkly fingers. You might also notice that the soles of your feet get wrinkled as well after soaking. A half-hour or so after drying off, and they go back to normal. Common sense might tell you that the water soaked in and caused your skin to expand, but you'd be wrong. If that were the case, why doesn't the skin on our legs or stomachs wrinkle in water? Researchers have discovered that the skin on our fingers wrinkles actively, as an autonomous nervous response. The median nerve is one of the main nerves running down our arms. In people who have their median nerve severed, fingers no longer wrinkle in water. So it is a response our bodies have developed, but why? Recent experiments show that fingers wrinkled by soaking in water improve our grip on wet objects. If that's the case, then it makes sense that the skin on our feet wrinkles as well, in order to give us a better grip on wet surfaces that we may walk on. An article at BBC Future lays out the precise procedures our bodies go through to give us wrinkly fingers and how we found out the purpose for such a response. -via Damn Interesting(Image credit: Brenderous) #finger #soak #wrinkle #autonomousresponse

After Losing His Fingers, Engineer Built His Own Steampunk Mechanical Prosthetic HandAfter a workshop accident where he smashed his hand, Ian Davis suffered a blood infection that ultimately led to amputations of four fingers on his left hand. To make matters worse, Davis learned that his insurance would have covered the cost of a prosthetic hand if he had lost his entire left hand - not just the four fingers because "fingers are not medically necessary."Being a mechanical engineer, Davis decided to build himself a steampunk prosthetic hand - one that is better than a medical prosthetic hand, and at a fraction of the cost.In this YouTube video, Davis managed to enable the splay function on his mechanical prosthetic hand.