Until now, those who have lost their sense of touch have just had to live with the problem, trying instead to become more aware of their surroundings using the senses that remain. James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University, and his colleagues now hope to change this. In a paper just published in Chaos, they describe a way to boost the sense of touch, thus paving the way for those whose tactile abilities have been damaged by strokes, diabetes or mere decrepitude to feel their way around the world again. Their method - electrically stimulating a patients skin - relies on one of the most paradoxical observations in science: that adding noise to a signal can sometimes make it easier to detect.