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On a gray and rainy October day in Palo Alto, Calif., the palms lining the driveway to Stanford University silently drip and the perfectly manicured lawns are lush and green. For a group of chemistry researchers a few buildings away, these plants are not merely a spot of beauty on the way to the office, but a daily inspiration. Inside Thomas Jaramillo’s Stanford lab, these researchers are trying to catch sunlight in a bottle—a pair of connected bottles, actually. The glassware is filled with water and flooded with light from a solar lamp. Inside one bottle is a shiny iridium wire. In the other is a tiny electrode coated with an experimental catalyst. This system uses light to drive plant-inspired water-splitting reactions, generating molecular hydrogen. Behind an adjacent glass cabinet, another experiment is under way with a mess of plastic tubing ferrying away products made, in a plantlike manner, in

Today’s prosthetic hands and other limbs have become incredibly advanced, containing more moving joints and lighter materials than ever before. In some cases, electronic sensors on the prosthetics even read electrical signals from the wearer’s muscles and translate them into movement. Yet artificial limbs don’t offer the sense of touch that connects us with loved ones or allows us to enjoy the silky feel of a fabric. Perhaps more important, without a sensing skin, today’s prosthetics and robotics lack the ability to pick up on the tactile signals that silently inform our reflexes. A person wearing a prosthetic limb has very little sense of where it is without looking at it. Researchers working on stretchy, large-area electronics hope to mimic at least some of the critical sensing features of real skin—and add new ones, such as displays that “blush” to communicate emotion. Electronic skin will expand the functionality of prosthetics