Even though we use them all the time, we rarely appreciate how subtle a piece of evolutionary engineering our hands really are, and replicating their function mechanically is a task that has defied roboticists for many years. However, Shadow Robotics claim to have done exactly that, creating a robot mitt with ‘comparable force output’ to the human version, and incorporating the full 24 degrees of freedom as well. The pictures show it holding eggs and plastic bottles – if they’re not just good PR shots, Shadow must have cracked the ‘force-feedback’ problem, and the videos seem to confirm it.