Climbing Walls with Carbon Nanotubes

The human being has always tried to go beyond their possibilities, they don’t have wings to fly, don’t have gills to dive and also they don’t have claws to climb.
But sometimes just observing the nature, humans have achieved lots of great discoveries and inventions, from the design of a plane or helicopter and the principles of aerodynamics based in the observation of birds and insects, until the creation of the submarines to explore the secrets of the ocean through the observation of compression and decompression systems in the sperm whales.
Now is almost ready and under further research a new material inspired in the microscopic hairs that the gecko lizard possess in their feet, which will be able to allow the humans to access to some activities that didn’t have before and to improve enormously some existent ones.
The prospect of being able to emulate a gecko and walk up a wall and across the ceiling has come a step closer to reality. Researchers at the University of Akron and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have begun to work out how to make a material coated with synthetic gecko hairs. This new material (developed by engineers mimicking the hairs on gecko feet by growing carbon nanotubes in bundles), has been created to match the nimble lizard's incredible grip, and researchers say that the applications will be endless.
We could make super-grip shoes for athletes and tyres that hold the road better in all weathers, for example. And in Hollywood, actors playing superheroes like Spiderman or Neo from The Matrix could climb walls and walk on the ceiling without the studios resorting to computer graphics.
The ability of some animal species to develop tools to survive in their eco-systems and that have needed thousands of years to improve and perform, now can be emulated by humans using their technologies to make more efficient the way they live, just through some years of investigation and testing.

Pablo Milara

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3726

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/18966/