If you were desperately looking for a reason to juice a spider with radioactive material or attempt to roll around in nuclear waste, hold off for now. You’re not likely to turn into Spider-Man in either case, especially now that science has put a stake through the heart of one of the main spider-powers you’d want to mess around with.
If you were hoping to be able to wall crawl and stick to the ceiling like Peter Parker, it’s not going to happen. At least not unless you get really, really sticky or make your entire body one sticky pad. According to EurekaAlert, a study at the University of Cambridge has found that size matters when it comes to sticking to walls. And humans are way past that cut off:
A new study, published today in PNAS, shows that in climbing animals from mites and spiders up to tree frogs and geckos, the percentage of body surface covered by adhesive footpads increases as body size increases, setting a limit to the size of animal that can use this strategy because larger animals would require impossibly big feet.
Dr. David Labonte and his colleagues in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology found that tiny mites use approximately 200 times less their total body area for adhesive pads than geckos, nature’s largest adhesion-based climbers. And humans? We’d need about 40 percent of our total body surface, or roughly 80 percent of our front, to be covered in sticky footpads if we wanted to do a convincing Spiderman impression.
Now there is some hope out there for those wannabe wall crawlers with severely short-sighted goals. Technology may come to the rescue in the form of large-scale adhesives or sticky pads on extremities that are just super sticky. A study on frogs shows that they have adapted to make their pads stickier as opposed to bigger. This allows them to have the same effect as a larger pad, but less area. So if science gets to work, they can revive the news that they just killed!
That said, you likely don’t want to be the test subject for that adhesive. Next thing you know, some guy is aiming a gun at you because you’re hopelessly stuck to a wall for the rest of your life. A short life, but still a life.
(Via EurekaAlert / Engadget)
