Thanks lizards people will soon be able to walk on the ceiling

Known to us by comic books and movies Spider-Man - a pathetic loser. Whatever deeds he performed, it can not correct the them at the beginning of a fatal mistake: he chose not the prototype. Already, by attaching itself to the palm of a special tape, walk on walls and ceilings can, in principle, anyone, and three years later these gloves can be available even for window cleaners, wrote Wednesday in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. However, the developers of this material does not imitate spiders and lizards, geckos.



For centuries, people asked themselves how these lizards manage to escape even in the bottom of the absolutely smooth surface like polished glass? The mystery was solved a few years ago. It turned out that their ability to geckos obliged amazing natural mechanism - own paws. They grow millions of microscopic hairs. They are so thin that between them and the surface on which the moving lizard intermolecular attraction forces arise (so-called "van der Waals forces» - van der Waals forces). That they allow animals kept on a completely smooth surfaces and even hang from them, holding only one finger! Work on the fact that people can walk on walls and ceilings, as the gecko, began almost simultaneously in two countries - the USA and the UK. The Carnegie Mellon University (Carnegie Mellon University) in the US city of Pittsburgh and the University of California at Berkeley (University of California in Berkeley) have long been working hard to artificially reproduce the hairs lizards. British scientists a few years ago created the tape, which is breaking all known records the strength of seamless connections. It is based on the same principle that the "work" of gecko feet. A piece of tape on the size of one square centimeter have approximately one hundred million (!) Tiny nanovoloskov two microns in length, and thickness - only at 0, 2 microns. They "grow" out of the thicker mikrovolos leaving in a polymeric matrix. People are glued a strip of tape on his hands are free to walk on walls and even hang from the ceiling on a single hand.

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