“A student asked, ‘Yeah, but do the wrinkles always form in the same way?’ And I thought: I haven’t the foggiest clue!” said German, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. “So it led to this research to find out.”
I wish the authors would have mentioned the kid by name in the acknowledgement section of the paper. I bet the kid would have felt very proud and inspired to having their name published in a scientific journal.
This article instantly brought back memories of my childhood when my fingers would wrinkle after being in water too long. I used to think it was caused by the skin swelling from water, but it turns out it's actually due to blood vessels contracting—what a surprise! Even more amazing, this research not only answers a childhood question but can also be applied in forensic science, which I never expected!
Do we still retain curiosity about the world around us? Have I overlooked the huge potential hidden in small details? Curiosity is truly important， it always leads us to discover unexpected worlds.
> Do we still retain curiosity about the world around us?
If I don't, then it's mighty strange that I've been binging Groucho Marx interviewing random people from the audience in the 1950s show You Bet Your Life for the past few hours, and his fascinating interviews with Dick Cavette and William Buckley Jr.
Anyway yeah that's literally the main reason any of us are on HN. Besides procrastinating.
Shampoo makers add ingredients which alter what you perceive with fingers. so if you wash your hair with gloves on hand, you can feel that shampoo did nothing to your hair. or try one hand with glove, other without and you can touch your hair to feel that scam.
also most shampoos, shower gels are just soap making ingredients + fragrance + color...
not walking on direct sun most of the day did more to beauty of current population than any beauty product on planet. yes im ugly.
I don't know the scope of "nothing" in your statement, but shampoo does help remove dirt and oil, in a way that washing with water only cannot achieve, which is the number one goal of using shampoo for most people.
This is verifiable by observing and touching hair of other people's hair before and after shower, which eliminates the possibility of shampoo manufacturers secretly altering what you perceive with your fingers.
And yet, if I don’t shampoo for a few days and run my fingers through my hair, then there will be dirt under my fingernails. Would you argue that washing with water is enough?
Yeah, i meant as a not changing structure of hair. Open women magazine and read what adverts say their heavenly concoction allegedly does to your hair. It does not do that.
Most biometrics aren't easily hidden from your environment, everyone's constantly leaving fingerprints and handprints all over everything, shedding skin cells and other DNA material, face and irises can be easily photographed.
So it's kind of cool that a theoretical biometric could be stable over time and not easily leaked, that could take time to produce. Like some sort of cold storage biometric in the far future once certain biometrics become less useful after they're too easily lifted and replicated with new technology. Sort of like deprecating obsolete cryptographic protocols once they're too easily broken.
There should definitely be a scene in the next James Bond film where he rocks up to a top government facility and the guard hands him a terrycloth robe and directs him to an ultra sleek bathing cubicle
multiple times DNA got transferred between totally unknown people and wrong person got convicted... so more biometrics better.
obsolete cryptographic protocols are many times used as a fallback. some application gets response from malicious actor about not supporting such new crypto, so server falls back to older cipher.. lets say some 100s billion dollar companies use systems which behave like this still in 2025...
It's probably an evolutionary adaptation to give us better grip in the water. People with nerve damage who can't feel their fingers also don't get pruny fingers, so there's clearly a "get pruny" signal coming from the brain or at least higher up in the nervous system.
This actually made me smile. I usually wash my clothes by hand, and every time I do a big batch, I always get those wrinkly fingers never thought much of it.
It's kind of wild to realize there's actual research behind it. Even more surprising that it connects to forensic science and fingerprinting.
Science really does hide in the most ordinary places. I love this kind of curiosity.
I am reminded of a theory years ago that fingers wrinkling in water might have an evolutionary function, specifically to improve our grip when wet (or in water).
The wrinkly formation lets water drain better (like treads of a tire).
Your fingerprints are largely static according to all police forces. To me that implies that the skin on your fingers probably wrinkles in a largely constant way too when submerged in water. No evidence nor research done here - just fiat!
If this is new then CSI will probably have a new tool. I suggest investigating other areas of the body to see if the same holds.
Do we have toe prints? ... and does the wrinkling thing hold for toes?
And plenty of research has shown the police are wrong and fingerprints aren't super unique or static, that is just convenient for prosecuting cases. They are unique and static enough to differentiate between a handful of people you already have on a short suspect list in a shortish time frame usually, but once you start trying to sort populations by fingerprints or you find a random fingerprint and are trying to find some unknown person you don't know about, it falls apart and has fucked over a number innocent people.
Its like matching the make of a vehicle and their tire tracks. Yeah if you have someone you suspect, and you see he has the same tires and model of car as was reported, it likely is useful. But if you just try to blame the first person you find with the same model vehicle and the same tires despite the lack of other evidence, you are inevitably going to screw over some random innocent person. Fingerprints are less unique than someones face, and plenty of people have been thrown in jail because they merely looked like a suspect.
You can also lose your fingerprints the older you get. My mother in law is 65 and she has essentially no fingerprints (she used to have when younger though).
I believe loss of collagen also makes iPhone and Android and laptop fingerprint scanners perform much less reliably. I have no idea how border security scanners cope. I've noticed with seniors I help with digital life how they prefer face ID or pin, the fingerprint readers never seem to them to be as reliable.
Can confirm. Did a bunch of concrete work last summer, which ended up getting concrete inside my work gloves. Had to use passwords/windows hello all last summer.
> I have no idea how border security scanners cope.
They don't, cue Immigration officials being frustrated with seniors who are debarking after an international flight with a queue forming behind them....
Reminder that fingerprint forensics aren't nearly as infallible as people have been convinced they are and are based on an examiners opinion on a match.
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