In the future, everyone will be able to feel like Spider-Man thanks to a pair of gloves that feature special adhesion technology to surfaces. Inspired by small lizards, they allow people who wear them on their hands and feet to climb vertical walls, even glass ones.
Something reminiscent of the exciting scene from the 2011 film "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," where Tom Cruise climbs, wearing only a pair of special gloves, onto the outside of the tallest building in the world, Dubai's 830-meter-high glass skyscraper Burj Khalifa.
As reported by AMPE, the researchers, led by mechanical engineer Elliot Hawkes of Stanford University in California, who published the relevant paper in the journal of the Royal Society of Sciences of Britain, "Journal of the Royal Society Interface", according to "Science" and the British "Daily Mail", also performed a demonstration.
A 70-kilogram PhD student successfully climbed like a samian up a 3.6-meter-high glass wall. The surface area of the special glove on each hand and foot was 140 square centimeters. Until now, scientists had only been able to achieve something similar on very small surfaces of only a few square centimeters (adhesion decreases as the adhesion surface increases).
The new groundbreaking technology harnesses electrostatic "van der Waals forces," which force neighboring molecules to attract each other. Thanks to these forces, the small lizards have impressive adhesion abilities, to the point where they can hang their entire bodies in midair, attached to a surface by a single toe.
Using the same principle, scientists have created a synthetic dry adhesive that is more effective than that of samiamides. The new technology is being developed with funding from the Pentagon's ubiquitous Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose "Z-Man" program is investigating biologically inspired ways for US to transform into "spider-men."
Another application, according to the researchers, is its use by astronauts living in weightless conditions, even outside the spacecraft, in space. Currently, Elliot Hawkes' team is collaborating with NASA to create robots, which will be equipped with the "magic" adhesive substance at their extremities. They will thus have increased movement and manipulation capabilities on the outside of a spacecraft or a satellite for repairs and maintenance, for the collection of potentially dangerous space "garbage", etc.
