New Glue Does Whatever a Spider Can
from physorg
. . . or more accurately, whatever a gecko does, I guess, I mean who cares about accuracy in a post when I have magic glue that lets me climb up walls like Spiderman. They’re calling it “directional adhesive” and it looks like this way up close:
The adhesive sticks when it’s pulled along a surface but doesn’t stick when it’s lifted. So your hand wouldn’t slide down the wall but you could pull it free easily. Well, actually you could pull it off easily as long as you were able to lift your hand in a perpendicular line to the surface. If you were just hanging by one hand from a beam you’d be stuck there a while with no way to support your weight enough to pull your hand straight away. So you could climb up walls like a super mutant, but not across ceilings, and you sure wouldn’t want to high-five anyone as they passed by in a speeding train.
That being said however, the truly coolest application of this will be, finally, a great way to hang stuff on walls. Am I the only person disappointed by our civilization’s failure to find a better way to hang stuff on walls? It’s 2008 and I’m still worried about getting my deposit back on my apartment because I’m putting nails into drywall. I mean come on, Science, fix it! Oh wait, you just did.
Best Pull Quote of the Day:
This is a major milestone in the new field of gecko-inspired adhesives.
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