Chemists concoct nail polish that lets clawed humans use touch screens

Summary

An undergraduate chemistry researcher has developed a nail polish formulation that will let people use their nails to tap away on touch screens. Capacitive touchscreens use weak electrical fields across their screens that respond when an electrically conductive object, like the skin of a finger or a stylus, disrupts that field. Long nails have long been a problem for smartphone users since because fingernails don't conduct electricity. There's also a dreaded condition dubbed "zombie finger," where a person's finger simply won't work with a touchscreen, usually because it's covered with thick callouses of dead skin – think woodworkers or electric bassists. Manasi Desai, a student at Centenary College of Louisiana, has been working to solve the problem with her research supervisor, chemistry professor Joshua Lawrence. After a good deal of trial and error, they appear to have hit on a working formulation, albeit with a few areas for improvement, They presented their research to the American Chemical Society at its annual spring meeting this week. Other researchers have addressed the problem in the past, but the results were only available in jet black or very limited colors. The method Desai and Lawrence developed can actually go on clear - to a degree. To find their conductive chemicals of choice, the pair experimented with 50 different additives, most of which weren't effective. What did work, they discovered, were two options: A simple organic molecule known as ethanolamine, and taurine, a compound commonly found in over-the-counter health supplements and energy drinks. While both chemicals demonstrated electrical conductivity, they haven't yet figured how to deliver them in a method that would map to normal fashion trends, as Lawrence explained to The Register. "We have something that works, but only with an amount of polish that is decidedly not high fashion, unless 2-4 mm blobs on the end of nails is 'in' next season," Lawrence told us. The compound is also a bit...