How can we climb up walls like Spiderman?

Want to find out how we could all soon have our own Spiderman suits and why? Read on.

Cool, so we can climb walls like Spiderman now?

Eh, not quite but you could soon climb up walls like Gecko-man, if there is such a superhero.

The ability to climb walls on buildings, mountains and other planets that is currently being developed would be more akin to that of the minuscule lizards that can be found throughout the world, than eight-legged arachnids.

So how do they climb walls then?

The feet of geckos are covered in miniscule little hairs called spatulae that have tips about 200 billionths of a metre wide.

When walking on a surface the intermolecular forces working between that surface and the foot allow the gecko to hang vertically.

When a gecko changes the angle of its foot, it comes unstuck. Naturally, how geckos stick to things is preferable to things like sticky tape.

Why do you want to get rid of that? What’s your beef with sticky tape?

Well we like sticky tape and the powerful individuals who control the powerful multi-national conglomerates that own them, but the adhesive on sticky tape degrades fairly quickly after a few re-uses.

Researchers from Stanford University developing a synthetic way to mimic this gecko effect showed that their prototypes could be re-used some 30,000 times without losing their stickiness.

With a single one of these microscopic hairs able to support the weight of an ant this could have some serious practical implications.

Like what?

Well they think it’s very feasible that they can get this synthetic gecko-stick system to support tonne weights so it will come in handy for construction machinery.

It could also be used to close surgical wounds, to explore mountainous regions on Mars for military purposes and yes, indeed a Spiderman suit.

Cool, tell us about the Spiderman suit?

Well it’s not too far off according to a report on the BBC website.

They report that physicist and engineer Nicola Pugno calculated that a person wearing gloves and boots made of carbon nanotubes of the synthetic spatula could hang off walls like everybody’s favourite web-slinger.

Professor Pugno said: "We are not very far, in my opinion, from a kind of Spider-Man suit."

Indeed the good folks at Stanford have already developed a “sticky-bot” that you can see below:

There are plenty of companies working to be the first to master this art and they owe it all to the gecko.

Why do they owe it to the gecko, have we not been trying for years to do this?

Well scientists admit they would not have come up on this method without biologists studying the lizards. One Professor working on the adhesive said: "We can look to Nature as a giant library of design principles. The way gecko adhesives work is so bizarre and so different from the way that adhesives have been engineered, that I don't think we would have invented it."

Gliders from birds, wall-climbing from geckos – what next? Some sort of device inspired by a rabbit?