WASHINGTON, June 2 — Forget Spider-Man — Gecko Man may be breathing down your neck with gloves made of sticky hairs. Researchers in Britain said Monday they had developed a new type of adhesive based on the uniquely sticky feet of geckos. And yes, some day people may be able to use it to climb walls.
THE LITHE LITTLE LIZARDS can climb glass ceilings and perch happily for hours on the smoothest walls. Late last year, U.S. researchers reported they had found that tiny little hairs and not any kind of chemical glue help the animals cling so well.
Andre Geim of the University of Manchester in Britain, who developed the tape, said it is a more realistic model for people who may want to imitate nature than spiders.
“The mechanism used by spiders (and flies) for climbing walls is not scalable while the gecko mechanism is,” Geim said in an interview conducted by e-mail.
“This offers a unique opportunity for scaling the gecko’s invention up for the use with much heavier objects, even to the extent that humans can use it (e.g., for rock-climbing?),” said Geim, who reports his finding in the June issue of the journal Nature Materials.
“In this sense, Spider-Man is a fiction, the non-science one and will ever remain in comics. On the other hand, Gecko Man ... now it seems to be rather close to reality.”
Want to learn more?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/921016.asp
THE LITHE LITTLE LIZARDS can climb glass ceilings and perch happily for hours on the smoothest walls. Late last year, U.S. researchers reported they had found that tiny little hairs and not any kind of chemical glue help the animals cling so well.
Andre Geim of the University of Manchester in Britain, who developed the tape, said it is a more realistic model for people who may want to imitate nature than spiders.
“The mechanism used by spiders (and flies) for climbing walls is not scalable while the gecko mechanism is,” Geim said in an interview conducted by e-mail.
“This offers a unique opportunity for scaling the gecko’s invention up for the use with much heavier objects, even to the extent that humans can use it (e.g., for rock-climbing?),” said Geim, who reports his finding in the June issue of the journal Nature Materials.
“In this sense, Spider-Man is a fiction, the non-science one and will ever remain in comics. On the other hand, Gecko Man ... now it seems to be rather close to reality.”
Want to learn more?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/921016.asp