This past February, a team led by Professor Denis Headon of the Department of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, announced the principle behind fingerprint formation by identifying the ...

Fingerprints are the unique pattern of curves and ridges indented into the skin of a person’s fingertips. Most people have completely unique fingerprints, which can help with identification. Even in ...

A heat map of the receptive fields of sensory neuron receptors on a human fingertip. Jarocka et al., JNeurosci 2021 Our fingertips can provide us with detailed sensory information about anything we ...

“Do you think that every fingerprint is actually unique?”It’s a question that a professor asked Gabe Guo during a casual chat while he was stuck at home during the COVID-19 lockdowns, waiting to start ...

Fingerprints may be more useful to us than helping us nab criminal suspects: they also improve our sense of touch. Sensory neurons in the finger can detect touch on the scale of a single fingerprint ...

Our fingertips have an extraordinarily high sensitivity to touch – and now it looks like that sensitivity might be largely confined to the ridges of our fingerprints. “They really help us get very ...