Water-induced finger wrinkles improve handling of wet objects

You may have wondered why fingers develop wrinkles when wet for extended periods of time. It is known that this process is controlled by the nervous system, and therefore it seems likely to serve some kind of function. In this podcast we talk to Tom Smulders and Kyriacos Kareklas about their hypothesis that these wrinkles help improve our grip on objects under water. They discuss their study which has been published in Biology Letters, and present their experiments that show that people are faster at moving objects taken out of water if their fingers are wrinkled than if they are not. See their paper at http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.or...

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  Science & Technology

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Sent here by Alex Dainis's coverage of this same topic. watch?v=vosW6FL5RPQ