We can be heroes, pt. 3Oh Spidey. Inside all of us meek nobodies is a fearless hero just waiting to be bitten by a radioactive spider.
Slingin' webs, gettin' girls, smitin' evil doers, but most importantly, climbin' walls.
How does one climb a wall? Rock climbers take the insect approach, man-made claws attached to their feet get forced into cracks to keep them in place while their hands reach in to other cracks to lift them up. But Spider-Man doesn't, his hands and feet just "stick" to surfaces. Something else is needed, something... sciencey. The force most likely to make us all Spider-Men-And-Women is called a Van der Waals' force, and it happens at the atomic level.
The atom. The infinitely complex building block of life, the universe and everything. Remember in high school when you were told that atoms are made of a positive centre (protons and neutrons) with lots of little negative electrons orbiting around it? This system keeps the amount of positive and negative charge in balance, which keeps the atom stable. Breaking this balance causes nuclear explosions, but bending it just a little is what Van der Waals' forces are all about.
Explaining what a Van der Waals' force is makes for a boring blog post, so I'll keep it to this paragraph. Like a planet's orbit around the sun, an electron's orbit isn't perfectly circular, sometimes it's elliptical. While the atom's average charge is still neutral, the negative charge at the tips of the ellipse are stronger than the rest as they are further from the atom's positive centre. This gives an atom two negatively charged tips, and a positively charged middle section. On it's own that means nothing, but get two atoms shaped like that close to each other and they'll act like a pair of magnets, with the tips being attracted to the other's middle. That attraction is called a Van der Waals' force, and it's one of the weakest atomic forces known to us.
In a half-arsed effort to visualise what I'm talking about, here's a picture of two of the kind of atoms that I've mentioned above being attracted to each other.
So what if I only had one egg? The point is that oval-shaped atoms act like magnets, and many of them working in concert can add up to a very strong force. Spiders and geckos use this trick of physics by having tiny hairs on the ends of their feet that narrow down to a few atoms in width, like tiny Van der Waals needles. Thousands of these hairs sticking to a surface allows the spider walk on walls and ceilings.
Why let nature have all the fun? Work is being done to replicate what spiders and geckos have naturally using another of science's wonderkids: carbon nanotubes. Of the three superhero technologies that I've written about so far, this is the most promising. We'll be climbing those walls in no time!
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I mean, I know there's some weird shit out there in the internet tubes, and I assume you found that fat Spiderman pic in the tubes, but WHO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SHAVES THEIR BALLS AND PAINTS THEM BLUE?
Just when you thought Akron, Ohio, couldn't get any freakin' cooler for having spawned The Black Keys, their scientists come up with this..
Synthetic gecko hairs are cool and all, but you have to marvel (heh, marvel.. spiderman...) at nature being able to produce them first. What kind of genetic mutations ended up selectively evolving geckos with such a trait?
As far as spidey is concerned, i say good on him for having fun. When was the last time any of you had the blue balls to do something like that, let alone get you picture taken doing it? I salute him as a true hero.
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