'Spiderman gloves' within reach, scientists say

Scientists working to replicate the incredible stickiness of gecko lizard's feet have come up with a sort of tape that could allow people to climb, superhero-style, on glass ceilings and walls.

Geckos — a type of lizard with weak limbs, a stout body and a large head — can dangle their entire weight from a wall by a single toe. They can heave themselves up a sheet of polished glass at remarkable speed, covering as much as one metre in only a second.

The secret behind their incredible stickiness was only recently cracked, and now a team of researchers working mainly from the University of Manchester has published in the journal Nature Materials the results of two years' work on a synthetic version of a gecko's foot.

"They have been able to manufacture self-cleaning, re-attachable dry adhesives," the university said in a statement. "The research team believes it won't be long before 'Spiderman' gloves become a reality."

An American academic also chasing the elusive "gecko glue" — University of California, Berkeley, biology professor Robert Full — said that the uses for such a product would be "almost unlimited."

"In addition to a general adhesive, it can be used to move computer chips in a vacuum, pick up small fibres and design novel bandages. It's like Velcro without the need for an opposite," he said.

A team of U.S. biologists and engineers released a study last summer which explained that geckos are able to scale even sheer walls because the hairs on their feet form electrodynamic bonds with the surface, a force discovered possible by Johannes van der Waals more than a century ago.

Those scientists suggested that it was the size and shape of the foot hairs that determined a gecko's ability to adhere to a surface, not what the hairs were made of.

Gecko feet are covered with millions of tiny setae, hairs only twice as long as a strand of human hair is wide. Each seta has 1,000 tiny pads on its tip, a tip that is so small it is below the wavelength of visible light, only 200 billionths of a metre wide.

Creating gecko-glue is a goal that has even piqued the interest of the U.S. military. Some research has been funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the Pentagon, though it has not revealed any plans it might have for it.

"We have … considered producing a large amount of gecko tape — sufficient amounts to enable a student to hang out of a window of a tall building," the statement from the Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology at the University of Manchester said. "However it would cost too much money and would not benefit us scientifically."