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| Figure 2 from the paper |
Three frames from a video (electronic supplementary material, movie S1) showing a 70 kg climber ascending a 3.7 m vertical glass surface using a synthetic adhesion system with degressive load-sharing and gecko-inspired adhesives. The time between (a) and (c) is about 90 s and includes six steps.
Geckos, when not shilling for insurance companies, are most known for their climbing abilities that let them scale walls effortlessly. Thanks to their biology, geckos have one major advantage over humans who want to move vertically: they are small, and their bodies are light, so their natural adhesive just has to be good, not great. But a team of scientists from Stanford University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering have now one-upped the gecko, creating a hand-sized adhesive surface that allows humans to vertically scale glass walls.
I don't plan on rock climbing sheer faces of office buildings any time soon, but the fact they've figured this out (without the proverbial radioactive genetically enhanced spider) is pretty neat!
Popular Science:
Scale a Glass Wall With Gecko-Inspired Adhesive on Your Hands, Kelsey D. Atherton
Royal Society Publishing:
Human climbing with efficiently scaled gecko-inspired dry adhesives
Elliot W. Hawkes, Eric V. Eason, David L. Christensen, Mark R. Cutkosky
Wikipedia:
van der Waals Force
van der Waals Equation
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